Travel the Universe with the help of this realistic interactive map

Astronomers at Johns Hopkins University in the United States have created a new map of the Universe that shows for the first time with precision the extent of the entire known cosmos. The data used in this effort was mined over the course of two decades since Sloan Digital Sky Survey????????

This interactive guide, previously accessible only to scientists, has been made available to the general public, who can browse online or even download the document. Now anyone interested will be able to see the actual positions and true colors of 200,000 galaxies.

The creator of the map, Brice Ménard, a professor at Johns Hopkins, said that during his childhood he was inspired by astronomical imagery and has now managed to create a new type of image to inspire others. “Astrophysicists around the world have been analyzing this data for years, leading to thousands of scientific papers and discoveries,” Ménard said. “But no one has taken the time to create a map that is beautiful, scientifically accurate, and accessible to non-scientists.” For him, this new map appears as a way to show people the Universe as it is.

OR Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a pioneering effort to capture the night sky through a telescope located in New Mexico. Astronomers have spent years of acquisitions to obtain this extraordinarily broad perspective.

The expansion of the Universe helps make this map even more colorful. The further away an object is, the more red it appears. The top of the screen indicates the former rapid radiation emitted shortly after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

Each dot on the map is a galaxy, and each galaxy contains billions of stars and planets. The Milky Way is just one of those spots. “On this map, we are just a particle after all, just a pixel. And when I say we, I mean our galaxy, the Milky Way, which has billions of stars and planets,” says Ménard.

He hopes people will experience both the map’s undeniable beauty and its impressive scale. “From that particle at the bottom,” she says, “we’re able to map galaxies throughout the universe, and that says something about the power of science.”

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Source: Olhar Digital