Astronomers at Johns Hopkins University in the United States have created a new map of the Universe that accurately displays the extent of the entire known cosmos for the first time. The data used in this endeavor was mined over two decades by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey????????
This interactive guide, hitherto accessible only to scientists, is made available to the general public, who can browse online or even download the document. Now anyone interested will be able to see the true position and true colors of 200,000 galaxies.
Université Johns Hopkins / YouTube
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The creator of the map, Brice Ménard, a professor at Johns Hopkins, said that during his childhood he was inspired by astronomical images and has now succeeded in creating 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 nobody took the time to create a map that was 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.
O Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a pioneering effort to capture the night sky through a telescope located in New Mexico. It took years of captures for astronomers to get this extraordinarily wide perspective.
The vastness of the Universe on the map
The expansion of the Universe helps make this map even more colorful. The further away an object is, the redder it appears. The top of the screen indicates the first glow radiation emitted shortly following 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 these points. “On this map, we’re just a particle down, just a pixel. And when I say us, I mean our galaxy, the Milky Way, which has billions of stars and planets,” explains Ménard.
He hopes people will experience both the undeniable beauty of the map and its awe-inspiring expanse. “From that particle down there,” he says, “we’re able to map galaxies across the universe, and that says a lot regarding the power of science. »
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