Earlier this week I have referenced NASA’s online repository Image of the Day. What I present today is way different but impressive all the same – a man-made representation of the observable universe. That’s it, in a logarithmic scale with the Solar System at its centre.
This wonderful image was created by artist Pablo Carlos Budassi, who has put together a series of Princeton University’s logarithmic maps based on NASA data (for a wallpaper resolution, go here). In 2005, Princeton’s researchers produced “a new conformal map of the universe illustrating recent discoveries, ranging from Kuiper Belt objects in the solar system to the galaxies and quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This map projection, based on the logarithm map of the complex plane, preserves shapes locally and yet is able to display the entire range of astronomical scales from the Earth’s neighbourhood to the cosmic microwave background. The conformal nature of the projection, preserving shapes locally, may be of particular use for analysing large-scale structures. Prominent in the map is a Sloan Great Wall of galaxies 1.37 billion light-years long, 80% longer than the Great Wall discovered by Geller and Huchra and therefore the largest observed structure in the universe.” (J. Richard Gott III, Mario Jurić, David Schlegel, Fiona Hoyle, Michael Vogeley, Max Tegmark, Neta Bahcall, and Jon Brinkmann (2005) “A Map of the Universe”, The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 624, Number 2. The American Astronomical Society. The whole article is available online, while the details of the maps are here).
While the single maps show different sections, in the composite image realised by Budassi you can recognise a few planets of the Solar System, and, progressively farther away from the centre, more distant objects of our universe, such as the Kuiper belt, the Oort cloud, Alpha Centauri star, the Perseus Arm, the Milky Way galaxy, Andromeda galaxy, nearby galaxies of the Virgo Superclusters – and then the cosmic web, the cosmic microwave radiation, until reaching the invisible plasma produced by the Big Bang at the very edge of it.
Impressive, isn’t it?
It looks awfully small to me! I suppose there are larger versions?
Yes, there’s a wallpaper version at the link I’ve mentioned. Instead if you’re interested in the charts which this one has been based upon, I have referenced above the University of Princeton website where you can retrieve them 🙂
Thank you, Steph!