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Scientists release biggest 2D map of the universe
Direct link to Legacy Survey Sky Viewer: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org https://viewer.legacysurvey.org
- therobot24 1mo agomake sure you watch the youtube video embedded in the website, it adds some real perspective of just how massive this is
- Snoeprol 1mo agoYep and the examples are really cool!
- br0ceph 1mo agois there anyway to download the entire map, and play with it locally
- micromacrofoot 1mo ago5.6 trillion pixels uncompressed is somewhere in the range of 16TB but check out https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/#PGC3097688 https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/#PGC3097688 and https://datalab.noirlab.edu/data/legacy-surveys https://datalab.noirlab.edu/data/legacy-surveys
- cheesemonk66 1mo agoThis is beautiful and terrifying. Thank you for sharing.
- fercircularbuf 1mo agoWow, this is humbling
- sambapa 1mo agoIn what ways? Galaxies are just fat fucks, they don't do no philosophy, play piano or shitpost.
- Towaway69 1mo agoIf you squint, look at just the right portion, at just the right zoom level, the stars line up and spell out "thanks for all the fish".
- sambapa 1mo agoHm, that's a good thing to consider - are there portions of the sky in which stars align into a coherent text?
- Towaway69 1mo agoJust gotta join the dots! ;) Or better still, develop a traveling salesman solution for visiting each star just once. > Bowerick Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was a being who became immortal after an accident with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator. After a period of total boredom, especially on Sunday afternoons, he decided to insult everyone in the entire universe in alphabetical order. [1] So that wouldn't be just an academic exercise! [1] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Bowerick_Wowbagger https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Bowerick_Wowbagger
- dylan604 1mo agoFeed it to an LLM to see what it hallucinates
- idiotsecant 1mo agoI think the odds of a character are very high, the odds of a short word are very high, the odds of a meaningful sentence are quite low, and the odds of anything more than that vanishingly small. It probably also depends on whether you're ok with viewing your assembly from an arbitrary position or if it must be from earth.
- cwmoore 1mo agoNot this data, but from nearby 3D star map with rotations: https://www.ouruboroi.com/moire3 https://www.ouruboroi.com/moire3
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- doodlebugging 1mo agoThat's impressive. Though I think there's too much space on this plane. I'm wondering whether it is actually a 2D view since it obviously isn't planar. To paraphrase Samuel L Jackson - "I have had it with this m'f'ing space on a plane! Everybody strap in I'm about to open some f'in' windows." Proceeds to crank open an array of telescopes to get another 3D perspective of a 4D universe so we can project it onto our 2D viewing devices as if that were reality.
- fluoridation 1mo agoIt's 2D because it's the surface of a sphere.
- doodlebugging 1mo agoSorry. That whole post was intended to be a joke. I did not do a good job setting it up or letting it fly.
- layer8 1mo agoIt’s 2D in the same sense as a 2D map of the world (Earth).
- doodlebugging 1mo agoSorry. That whole post was intended to be a joke. I did not do a good job setting it up or letting it fly.
- zuzululu 1mo agowhy is there so many weird flat lines is that an artifact? this is fascinating wish there was a 360 VR version of this truly immense scale
- dylan604 1mo agoback when I was playing with making VR content, this is one of the first things I did by using an 8K rectilinear image from NASA. Mapped it to a sphere and lined up Polaris at the zenith, and then just had one of the best nights of stargazing I had ever had!
- Towaway69 1mo agoI wonder how many of the red points/stars are black hole stars[1] [1] https://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-discover-brand-new-type-astrophysical-object-black-hole-star-0812 https://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-discover-brand-new-typ...
- ionwake 1mo agoi note the hyperspace bypass is missing
- antonvs 1mo agoNot many people know this, but the actual universe is 3D, so this map is misleading.
- Razengan 1mo agoCould this be used for a new Elitelike game?
- thewanderer1983 1mo agoAnd here I thought this was the biggest 2D map. https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/01/a-logarithmic-map-of-the-entire-known-universe-in-one-image/ https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/01/a-logarithmic-map-of-...
- layer8 1mo agoIt’s only 9734 by 9734 pixels [0]. The DESI LIS map is roughly 60,000 times larger. [0] https://payhip.com/b/Z9JQ https://payhip.com/b/Z9JQ
- cryptolobster 1mo agoHoly shit, this is very impressive
- pants2 1mo agoSeems like some of the most interesting objects are missing or have weird red/green artifacts, why is that?
- Towaway69 1mo agoFor 2001 fans, Atmosphères by Ligeti[1] also works very well while doom scrolling the endless canvas that is the Universe. [1] https://ubu.com/sound/ligeti.html https://ubu.com/sound/ligeti.html
- TheSpacerr 1mo agoAbsolutely crazy
- flockonus 1mo agoI knew the universe was nothing but a brick wall, now we have proof! https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=80.3728&dec=-69.4497&layer=ls-dr11&zoom=7 https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=80.3728&dec=-69.4497&lay... /jk
- layer8 1mo agoMaybe we should replace the term “cosmological horizon” by “cosmological brick wall”.
- ck2 1mo agovaguely related to universe maps, I've been holding my breath for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launch at the end of the month It's going to do the best surveys EVER, like exponentially better * https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14942/ https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14942/ I thought for sure DOGE was going to kill it, or even rename it after him instead But the smallest planet Roman will be able to see would be Jupiter sized There was however going to be another telescope scheduled to launch in 2040 that could find earth-like worlds Fittingly enough it is called the "Habitable Worlds Telescope" but you know what, DOGE got that one Congress allocated $150 Million to begin development this year Somehow the executive branch pocketed that and changed it to $5 Million instead despite having no right to do that Yet another crime against science by this administration Hoping new Congress in January 2027 can fix this but I doubt it as too much of the rest of the country is "on fire" that has to be put out first So now won't be able to see its results in my lifetime
- hn_throwaway_99 1mo agoI read the article but didn't watch the videos yet, but I'm curious as to what would be needed to make this a 3D map. That is, I'm assuming this 2D map records the position of all of these objects in the sky, but not the distance from Earth. But I thought that calculating the distance of objects is relatively straightforward, e.g. you hear all the time "Galaxy X is 2 billion lightyears away" or whatever. Would it just be really computationally expensive to calculate the distance to all of the 4 billion objects identified in the map?
- LeBit 1mo agoI think it is 2D because the universe is not that thick?
- jbritton 1mo agoI will add that it is said the universe is flat, but that does not mean 2d flat. Flat is a mathematical construct, which means parallel lines stay parallel and triangle angles sum to 180 degrees. So it is 3d flat at least as far as we can observe.
- LeBit 1mo agoI was mistaken. Our solar system is flat. Galaxies are mostly flat. But the universe is not flat. Galaxies are all over the place. So, I was mistaken. But, just to be clear: I am not a flat earther! Flat is relative here. The thickness of our galaxy is not measured in kilometers ofc. It is just that within the same units , solar systems and galaxies are flat relative to their length.
- soulofmischief 1mo agoThere are a lot of unknowns and processes that must be undone, which often require an unknown basis. Red shift, moving bodies, gravitational lensing and other processes distort light along its journey. Sometimes we don't know the exact magnitude of a star, etc. Spectroscopy helps a lot but is limited by the fidelity of our datasets.
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- KaiMagnus 1mo agoI've got some crazy feelings browsing this. Are there any particularily detailed areas? But maybe the humbling reality is just: The closer we look, the more galaxies appear where we thought was black void…
- layer8 1mo agoAnd we can only look as far as the CMB. The universe might be gazillion times larger beyond that, or, indeed, infinitely large.
- squigz 1mo agoDon't we more or less already know that the universe - at least the space itself, not the stuff in it - is indeed infinitely large?
- jahnu 1mo agoIt’s still an open question in cosmology. We’re still not sure even if it’s “flat”.
- layer8 1mo agoWe don’t, and it’s likely that we will never know. Space may be non-Euclidian with a positive curvature, in which case it would correspond topologically to the “surface” of a four-dimensional sphere. One much larger than the observable universe (since the local curvature that we can measure is approximately flat), but nevertheless finite.
- squigz 1mo agoI really have no idea what this means but I guess my mental model of the universe is quite wrong haha
- mbil 1mo agoBringing it down a dimension: > The earth may be round, in which case we’re on the “surface” of a three-dimensional sphere. One much larger than what we’ve seen (since the ground around us is approximately flat), but nevertheless finite. Of course maybe the 4D sphere of the universe is itself hung in a vast field of other 4D universes, that field is the surface of a 5D sphere, etc.
- anigbrowl 1mo agoResearchers expect it will remain the most comprehensive 2D map of our universe for years to come. Most likely. I doubt there is going to be any serious investment in astronomy over the next decade given economic headwinds and a deteriorating strategic situation. The big money will be going into defense and economic sovereignty and building/launching new high powered telescopes will not be a priority. Optical/sensor advances will be prioritized for earth observation (commercial, military, or weather/climate) and it maybe that we're in an era of diminishing technological returns already. I do expect a lot of analytical advances thanks to the combination of open datasets and AI, although it seems more likely that most of these will be in stamp collecting - interesting astronomical facts for people who are already interested in astronomy. Hard to guess if we will see challenges to prevailing cosmological theories.
- zappb 1mo agoTelescopes are related to spy satellites, something that will remain in high demand. The telescopes provide a good cover story for international press.
- smilespray 1mo agoWasn't the Hubble telescope a spare from the surveillance satellite program that they basically just turned towards space?
- rootusrootus 1mo agoNot quite. It was developed using some shared technology from the KH-11. Very different optics and sensors, for sure, looking out into space is a lot different from looking at something a couple hundred miles away.
- catlifeonmars 1mo agoThe type of telescopes you would use to look at the earth from space are not at all the same as the types of telescopes you would use to look back into deep time. I think the two use cases would compete for funding rather than complement each other. Maybe there is some technological overlap in the optical telescope space, but that is only a subset of the types of telescopes that you would use to study what the universe looked like when the first stars were forming.
- nicechianti 1mo ago[dead]
- sans_souse 1mo agoOh this is cool! Google Space could soon be an app :) https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/ https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/
- ed_mercer 1mo agogetting a 502
- eliax 1mo agoJust tell me the Universe is a simulation please...
- walrus01 1mo agoI'm surprised the current US federal government is allowing its employees to publish anything with evidence the universe is >6000 years old.
- ChristmasTomer 1mo ago[dead]
- svobodamartin 1mo ago502 Bad Gateway result from Direct link to Legacy Survey Sky Viewer: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org https://viewer.legacysurvey.org
- BearOso 1mo agoTry https://legacysurvey.org/viewer https://legacysurvey.org/viewer
- svobodamartin 1mo agoThat works, thanks!
- hnfwd5lqmp 1mo agoTook notes, thank you
- zerodocapp 1mo ago[dead]
- robertoconnor 1mo ago[dead]