Scroll through the universe with a new interactive map

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

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

The interactive map, which depicts the precise place and actual colours of 200,000 galaxies, is offered on-line, the place it will also be downloaded at no cost.

“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 individuals,” says map creator Brice Ménard, a professor at Johns Hopkins.

“Astrophysicists world wide have been analyzing this information for years, resulting in hundreds 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 aim right here is to indicate everyone what the universe actually seems like.”

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a pioneering effort to seize the night sky by way of a telescope based mostly in New Mexico. Night time after night time for years, the telescope geared toward barely totally different places to seize this unusually broad perspective.

The map, which Ménard assembled with the assistance of former Johns Hopkins pc science pupil 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 solely one in every of 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 after 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 exhibiting one galaxy right here, one galaxy there or maybe a bunch of galaxies. However what this map reveals is a really, very totally different scale.”

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

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