Scroll through the universe with a new interactive map

A brand new map of the universe shows for the primary time the span of your complete recognized cosmos with pinpoint accuracy and sweeping magnificence.

Created by Johns Hopkins College astronomers with knowledge mined over twenty years by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the map permits the general public to expertise knowledge beforehand solely accessible to scientists.

The interactive map, which depicts the precise place and actual colours of 200,000 galaxies, is obtainable on-line, the place it will also be downloaded free of charge.

“Rising up I used to be very impressed by astronomy footage, stars, nebulae and galaxies, and now it is our time to create a brand new kind of image to encourage folks,” says map creator Brice Ménard, a professor at Johns Hopkins.

“Astrophysicists around the globe have been analyzing this knowledge for years, resulting in 1000’s of scientific papers and discoveries. However no person took the time to create a map that’s stunning, scientifically correct, and accessible to people who find themselves not scientists. Our objective right here is to point out everyone what the universe actually appears to be like like.”

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a pioneering effort to seize the night sky via a telescope based mostly in New Mexico. Evening after night time for years, the telescope aimed toward barely totally different areas to seize this unusually broad perspective.

The map, which Ménard assembled with the assistance of former Johns Hopkins laptop science scholar Nikita Shtarkman, visualizes a slice of the universe, or about 200,000 galaxies—every dot on the map is a galaxy and every galaxy accommodates billions of stars and planets. The Milky Way is just one among these dots, the one on the very backside of the map.

The enlargement of the universe contributes to make this map much more colourful. The farther an object, the redder it seems. The highest of the map reveals the primary flash of radiation emitted quickly after the Huge Bang, 13.7 billion years in the past.

“On this map, we’re only a speck on the very backside, only one pixel. And once I say we, I imply our galaxy, the Milky Way which has billions of stars and planets,” Ménard says. “We’re used to seeing astronomical footage displaying one galaxy right here, one galaxy there or maybe a bunch of galaxies. However what this map exhibits is a really, very totally different scale.”

Ménard hopes folks will expertise each the map’s simple magnificence and its awe-inspiring sweep of scale.

“From this speck on the backside,” he says, “we’re capable of map out galaxies throughout your complete universe, and that that claims one thing in regards to the energy of science.”