You Are Here (On Earth)

Anonymous Coward writes "NY Times today has an essay about a map of the entire universe produced by two Princeton astronomers using a variety of data including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Its view begins with the Earth at the bottom and extends back almost to the Big Bang at the top, including such objects as the Sloan Great Wall, 1.37 billion light-years long. The map can be found here."

I can see my house...

[Karl Prince]

I can see my house...

Re:I can see my house...

[mainframemouse]

Me too, though mines on Betelgeuse.

Re:I can see my house...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that you, Ford, you hoopy frood?

Re:Total Perspective Vortex

[o'reor]

The sun is within travelling distance.

Confirmed. Last time I took a trip around the Sun, it took me about a year to do it. And for free ! Food and accomodation at your expense, though.

Space tourism is much more affordable than some say.

That S.O.B. is down there somwhere...

[DaleBob]

I think I see my dad.

I'm here..

[Anonymous Coward]

Great.. but where the hell are the restrooms?

Re:I'm here..

[Boiling_point_]

Mostly in Australia [toiletmap.gov.au].

She canna take any more captain!!

[kiwioddBall]

With 500k graphical images to download you can be sure that by the time you read this you are too late - its been slashdotted!!

Google is your friend!

[TheMidget]

A usual with the NYT, Google [google.com] is your friend. Just click on the "If the URL is valid..." link, and here you go, without any need to make up data for the subscription form!

Re:Google is your friend!

[ballpoint]

Well well; this does away with the need for the PARTNER= NYT links.

From now on I just need to remember to paste NYT URLs into the (Google) search box instead of the address box in Opera.

Simple & Neat. Thanks !

Re:Google is your friend!

[TheMidget]

Referer header. If NYT thinks that you were referred by Google news, it lets you in, if it sees that you come from Slashdot, it doesn't (except with the PARTNER hack...).

As Google news, and Google the search engine have the same Domain, NYT apparently does not (yet...) tell them apart.

Whoa

[rfinnvik]

Oooh, the Total Perspective Vortex!

*waits for Gargravarr to make an appearance*

Re:Whoa

[fuzzybunny]

Yes, except someone got a decimal point wrong. Slashdot readers still have their souls, but no lives.

(-:

Hey you

[Timesprout]

Get out of my garden !!!

complete, sure

[lemody]

I heard that next time they are going to release the last decimal of pi.

Re:complete, sure

[Mr_Silver]

I heard that next time they are going to release the last decimal of pi.

Mmmmmmmmmm .... pie.

Re:complete, sure

[ahogue]

Obligatory Fox Trot [ucomics.com] reference.

Re:complete, sure

[mark-t]

Actually, the last digit of pi either 5, 9 or 4.

This can be proven, if somewhat bizarrely, by showing that since pi is the sum of an infinite number of rationals, and there are an infinite number of them that have decimals which repeat forever, that for a hypothetical digit position that is infinitely far away from the decimal point, each digit from 1 through 9 would occur infinitely many times. The sum of 1 through 9 is 45. Since each digit occurs the same number of times, the sum in this column must be 45 times some number which has a last digit of 5 or 0. Since this hypothetical infinityith digit is the last digit of pi, there is no carryover from following digits sums, so the last digit must either be 5 or 0. If it were 0, then you could drop this digit and perform the same task as before, but this time since you are adding an extra 4, the sum must either end in a 4 or a 9 for this digit.

QED

Re:complete, sure

[noselasd]

And since there is no last digit of pi, the whole thing is ofcourse useless to discuss.

Re:complete, sure

[Anonymous Coward]

I shouldn't say this publicly, since I signed an NDA, but rumour has it that the last two digits are 42.

Voyagers and Pioneer.

[kiwioddBall]

It is interesting to see the Voyagers and Pioneer spacecraft on there. It is a fascinating subject for me, I believe that our technology will advance at sufficient speed that we will actually catch up with these craft with some future technology, and the issue will come up as to whether we bring them back to Earth as museum pieces or leave them on their course with special protection orders on them.

Food for thought.

And on an unrelated topic - Be careful - there is an acronymic something called WMAP lurking just on the far side of the moon, obviously hiding from earth.

I'm sure it is waiting for the perfect moment to attack!

Re:Voyagers and Pioneer.

[TehHustler]

WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) is sat in the L2 langrange point, beyond the Moon, monitoring all sorts of radiation type stuff. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF -8&q=wilkinson+microwave+anisotropy+probe&spel l=1

Location and orbit of WMAP

[Morgaine]

LOL, that post made the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) sound like a secretive spy satellite. :-)

Actually, WMAP is a hugely successful astronomical microwave observatory which sits at Earth's second Lagrange Point (L2). L2 is 1.5 million kilometers on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. This informative page [nasa.gov] shows the location and how the probe got there very clearly.

The WMAP was launched in June of 2001 and has made a map of the temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation with much higher resolution, sensitivity, and accuracy than its predecessor, COBE. It has been a huge success.

Re:Voyagers and Pioneer.

[Igloodude]

Special protection orders? Anyway, I'm sure some aliens will be happy to modify them and send them back to us, at which point the issue will come up as to whether the Creator is still around. Down, V'ger, that's a good boy.

Sloan Great Wall?

[sakusha]

What is this bit on the map about the Sloan Great Wall? I googled around but only found a reference to the map itself. If this is the biggest cosmic structure ever discovered, news of it sure hasn't traveled very far outside the astronomer's circles. What is the Sloan Great Wall?

Re:Sloan Great Wall?

[nv5]

here you go:

http://www.newscienceparadigms.com/astro/great_wal l.htm [newscienceparadigms.com]

Re:Sloan Great Wall?

[CmdrGravy]

That's an interesting article, why on Earth was the parent modded as Flamebait ? His was a perfectly reasonable question.

Re:Sloan Great Wall?

[Scarblac]

I found this: http://www.newscienceparadigms.com/astro/great_wal l.htm [newscienceparadigms.com]. Googled for 'wall light years sloan' after a few other tries :-) Apparently an even bigger wall has been found, but I 'm no astronomer either :-)

Re:Sloan Great Wall?

[Inominate]

From google. http://www.newscienceparadigms.com/astro/great_wal l.htm [newscienceparadigms.com]

Re:More importantly...

[pacman on prozac]

...whats the bit below it marked as CIA2 wall, godamnit! </tinfoil>

Re:Sloan Great Wall?

[FunkSoulBrother]

It's the largest wall of urinals known to mankind.

Re:Sloan Great Wall?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard it's so big, you can see it from China.

Paper Version

[BigBlackDog]

This map was published as a special pull-out in New Scientist, just before Christmas last year. Very cool.

Check out the data points on *that* cluster!

[MasonMcD]

Obligatory reference to centerfolds and geeks.

Carry on.

Urinals in Space!

[boog3r]

Following this announcement:

(Reuters) Announcing their latest push toward monopolization of the intragalactic bathroom market, Sloan Valve Company [sloanvalve.com] announced today their "Sloan Great Wall" which will be able to flush billions upon billions of stars into their new "Sloan Black Hole."

Investors showed their appreciation and stock prices backed all the way up to the fifth floor, when a plumber was called to alleviate the massive flooding.

Re:Urinals in Space!

[wildsurf]

which will be able to flush billions upon billions of stars into their new "Sloan Black Hole."

Interestingly, you don't need a black hole to get rid of unwanted material. Due to the expansion of spacetime, simply rocket something away from you faster than the escape velocity of your local group of galaxies (perhaps 1000km/sec), and eventually it will vanish from your observable universe, or at least become redshifted to invisibility. (The flip side, is that alien civilizations near the edge of our obser

Re:Urinals in Space!

[kin_korn_karn]

Interestingly
I don't know about the rest of your statement but I can say unequivocally that you are dead wrong here

Obvious(?) Alias Reference

[Gudlyf]

I was actually thinking that Arvin Sloan's (of the show Alias) master plan has finally been revealed. At long last!

But where's the fairy cake?

[Zocalo]

I thought looking at the whole of creation, as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, was supposed to screw with my mind [fscked.org] or something. It doesn't appear to have done so, and I can't see any fairy cake either... I'm sooo disappointed!

Pretty cool picture though; It'll look real nice alongside the Unix Family Tree [levenez.com] on the wall. If only there was a landscape version... time for some PostScript hacking I guess.

Look closely...

[CaptainAlbert]

If you zoom in on the SDSS galaxies at about 1 giga-parsec, it looks like one of them's broadcasting a message... looks like... "Can you hear me now?"... that can't be right.

Hmm... I did not find

[tsager]

the restaurant at the end of the universe!
So this map must be a fake!

Re:Hmm... I did not find

[Imperator]

The restaurant was at the end of the universe in time, not space. IIRC, it was a place where you could get a good meal while you watched the universe end--over and over again. So if it were to be on that map, it would have to be within our light horizon, which means the end of the universe would have already happened here. The good news: the restaurant might be out there beyond our vision. The bad news: we might see it one day. :)

the sun?

[mandalayx]

Looking at the map, you'll see that the sun is actually not that much farther from the Earth than Mars. I found that kind of interesting.

Anyone up for some Icarian missions? Maybe we should suggest a Sun Base to our deer leader :)

Re:the sun?

[MadMoses]

>Maybe we should suggest a Sun Base to our deer leader

George is a deer leader? That explains some things.

Re:the sun?

[CaptainAlbert]

Looking at the map, you'll see that the sun is actually not that much farther from the Earth than Mars

It looks that way, but in fact the y-scale is logarithmic. Mars is at around 0.4AU away, whereas the Sun is (by definition) at 1.0AU. So really, the Sun is more than twice as far away.

Plus, this map must be a snapshot in time, since it's quite possible for mars to be "on the other side" of the Sun, and thus further away from Earth than it, depending on the relative phase of the two planets' orbits.

Re:the sun?

[echucker]

It's definitely a snapshot, because it includes various probes and Halley's comet at specific positions, and does not plot a path of movement for them.

Re:the sun?

[nmg196]

Maybe we should suggest a Sun Base to our deer leader :)

I've heard the people on the Sun have had problems with global warming and high levels of background radation. In their favour though, they do seem to have got nuclear fusion working, which we have so far failed to do here on Earth.

China Seeking Royalty Claim!

[graveyardduckx]

The Chinese government is claiming to have property rights over all thing relating to "Great Walls" and are demanding the universe pay royalties for using this "Great Wall". In other news, the computer used to generate this map of the universe was running Linux so SCO is now claiming ownership over the entire universe. Permits to live in their universe may be purchased at any local SCO vendor for $699.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:comoving future visibility limit

[JabberWokky]

I've referred to it for many years as the "light cone" or "known space" (not as in Niven's Known Space). It's quite sobering that the universe, even that which we can mathematically predict (i.e., the result of the big bang) is so vast that there are areas that we will never interact with and, relativistially speaking, do not exist for us.

(And yes, I am quite aware that it's silly to say "never" when it comes to anything like this, but you most often work with the most proven theories. There *may* be an anti gravitational force, for instance, but I'm not leaping off the Eiffel tower anytime soon).

--
Evan

Not 1.3 Billion light years long

[wsloand]

The wall is actually 760 million light years wide... the comparison is that one light year is 1.3 billion times the length of the Great Wall of China. (Info is from here [postech.ac.kr].)

Re:Not 1.3 Billion light years long

[kin_korn_karn]

I'll need that figure in furlongs, leagues, and nautical miles, too. Thanks

Can anyone see Beagle 2 out there?

[gwicks]

It's got to be somewhere on the map!

Re:Can anyone see Beagle 2 out there?

[glenebob]

Yep, STILL stuck in Martian customs.

good, but what about those surprise galaxies?

[Janek Kozicki]

Surprise Galaxies at the Edge of Observable Space [slashdot.org] do not fit here?

If I'm right they would be somewhere above the Sloan Great Wall [newscienceparadigms.com]..

This is wrong!

[Doomrat]

This is clearly wrong. It doesn't look anything like the map in Frontier: Elite II.

Map of the universe.. hmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

SCO won't be happy when they find out they're not at the center of it...

Re:Map of the universe.. hmmm....

[fuzzybunny]

They are. Check out how far down below the surface of the earth that map goes.

Reminds me of the "Great Chain of Being".

[Daverz]

But where's Hell and that old fart on his throne?

http://www.stanford.edu/class/engl174b/chain.htm l

Earth-centric map

[Zog The Undeniable]

Obviously the Spanish Inquisition [ucr.edu] got to them first. Incidentally, the link says the Catholic Church finally agreed the Earth wasn't at the centre of the solar system in 1983!

Check out the "Zone of Avoidance"!

[HawkinsD]

I love the "zone of avoidance."

Perhaps it's an area that smells bad?

Oh, no, wait, it has to do with dust [csiro.au].

name of the preprint primary author :-)

[Heraklit]

did you notice the name of the primary author from the preprint on astro-ph/0310571?!

J. Richard Gott III - and guess what "Gott" means in german?

(same as english "god" of course! :-)

Re:name of the preprint primary author :-)

[kin_korn_karn]

And guess whose name starts with a J?

Jesus, of course!

So his name is Jesus Richard God III. Hey, Jesus Dick, how ya doin'

Center

[Spire]

Wow, so Earth really is at the center of the universe! I knew it!

Re:Center

[gunnk]

Actually, wherever you go, you are the center of your observable universe. So for Earth-dwellers, Earth really *is* the center of the (observable) universe.

Mostly harmless

[TTL0]

" Its view begins with the Earth at the bottom "

"What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One word!"
Ford shrugged.
"Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book's microprocessors," he said, "and no one knew much about the Earth of course."
"Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit."
"Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."
"And what does it say now?" asked Arthur.
"Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed cough.
"Mostly harmless!" shouted Arthur.

Another map

[swinerd]

Perhaps less scientific, but it looks cooler: An Atlas of the Universe [anzwers.org]

Traffic was terrible

[OH-58aKiowa]

I had to park out near Rigel and walk in. Who wants to bet my radio will still be there when I get back? Rigel's a tough neighborhood. I walked in to a bar and ordered a shot. Everybody ducked.

Parsecs

[Dr. Cody]

In what facets of astronomy are parsecs the dominant unit of measurement?

Look! There!

[whovian]

I found Waldo hidden in the Great Wall!

Re:

[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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Re:In the spirit of the last story

[panurge]

Because it should be 4000 miles from the center, obviously. They're rocket scientists, they know these things.

How long until this data hits Celestia?

[rwa2]

Right now Celestia [sf.net] by default only shows most of the stars in our arm of the Milky Way, plus two or three neighboring galaxies. Any reason why it couldn't be loaded up with the results of this survey at some point?

Humanoid "juggler" figure in Great Wall map?

[dpbsmith]

I see a pattern that looks like a human figure dancing, perhaps juggling a beach ball on his or her left arm, in the lower portion of the image of the Sloan Great Wall? [princeton.edu]

Earth at the Center?

[ocie]

So the church was right all along!?!

What's that near Pluto?

[Trejkaz]

It looks like "Guaoar", but the crappy font makes it hard to read. I've tried a few similar words and Google has given me squat.

Re:What's that near Pluto?

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

Quaoar.

Big space rock.

Tim

What is WMAP?

[jonr]

Just outside the Moon.

How come Heaven's not listed?

[jbarr]

Just wondering...

What I found odd...

[Gudlyf]

...was that from the Heliopause to the Oort cloud, there's nothing. Why is that? Did they just not get around to mapping anything in that area, or is it really simply empty, lonely space?

Distances in miles, in case anyone's interested.

[Chas]

The map is a representation of approximately 11.912216896 DUODECILLION MILES.

That's 11,912,216,896,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000 miles longhand.

I wonder how many burgers White Castle would have to serve to make a stack that reaches THAT far....

Ah ha!!!

[HarveyBirdman]

So the Earth *IS* the center of the universe! :)

Silly Scientists

[BaronCarlos]

I thought we beat this subject to death.

The EARTH is NOT the Center of the Universe? Why do we keep drawing our maps that way?

Copernicus and Gallileo are rolling in their graves right now.

Next you will be telling me that the Earth is flat!

*looks at the map again*
Oh wait, you are!

Re:Bad joke.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as a good lie.

There is, however, such a thing as a good model, as any true scientist will tell you. Obviously, the only perfect model of the universe is the universe itself; however, the derivation of useful models which are by design imperfect is absolutely at the heart of science.

Re:Bad joke.

[kin_korn_karn]

there is no cheese spreader.

Re:Bad joke.

[Anonymous Coward]

Proud owner of a Mensa membership card.

You should have returned it to its owner.

Re:Bad joke.

[Lijemo]

All flat maps of the US are lies. I mean, don't these people realize that it's impossible to make an acurate flat representation of a curved surface? Rivers change course, mountains are growing and erodeing, and don't even get me started on changing town and county boundaries. Besides, some of these maps have less than 50 meter accuracy in the placement of roads. They are lying to their customers!

Re:Bad joke.

[fuzzybunny]

All flat maps of the US are lies.

You bet they are. I've spent hours looking for the gigantic 'M' that's supposed to be near the immense yellow dotted line crossing through my town.

Re:Bad joke.

[wildsurf]

thus you can't create such a map.

Brings to mind this passage from Lewis Carroll, 1897:

"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"

"About six inches to the mile."

""Only six inches!"exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"

"Have you used it much?" I enquired.

"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.

Re:Bad joke.

[ideonode]

Others too have written about the (im)possibility of creating a map on a 1:1 scale.

Borges did so in "Of Exactitude in Science" in A Universal History of Infamy":

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

Umberto Eco then took up the challenge in "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1" in How to Travel with a Salmon:

When the map is installed over all the territory (whether suspended or not), the territory of the empire has the characteristic of being a territory entirely covered by a map. The map does not take into account this characteristic, which would have to be presented on another map that depicted the territory plus the lower map. But such a process would be infinite

A nice summary of the three can be found here [wmich.edu]

Re:Bad joke.

[Kynde]

Others too have written about the (im)possibility of creating a map on a 1:1 scale.

Impossible? I don't think so.
Gimme some petabytes of diskspace, a neat digicam with a good macro functionality and _some_ time and I'll ... oh feck it, how about fries and a coke?

Re:Bad joke.

[Lumpy]

What are you talking about?

This is a GREAT model/map for teaching. the general population sit's ther eand simply drools when they see a log chart so this is obviousally not for general public consumption but for scientists and students to use to get a better grasp on spatial locations from earth center at that given point in time.

pan this all you want, but I was able to teach my child some very important facts about our solar system with this chart. Her astronomical sciences teacher at her middle school was not able to explain a couple of the topics as clearly as this chart/map does.

This is a great tool, if you are not able to understand it's usefulness that is your loss.

Re:Bad joke.

[condensate]

I guess the drawers of this map were well aware of all the problems you mention. It is however not their goal to produce an accurate reproduction of the universe, but rather an idea of how large a large scale can be. Then, it is a static plot, and no time involved here. Think of it as a snapshot. If you had read the article [arxiv.org] you would have noted that the authors gave a concise introduction of how their map was drawn. The map should show large scale structures and keep the shapes locally correct. Therefore, t

Re:Bad joke.

[majuric]

What we are plotting on the map is the universe in 'comoving coordinates', which are determined by cosmological parameters (amount of luminous matter, dark matter and dark energy in the universe). They're the ones that determine the global curvature of space, and in the past few years have been measured very accurately (eg., with WMAP [nasa.gov]).

What you seem to be objecting to (among other things) is that the map should somehow depict local curvature as well (eg., you talk about closed timelike loops, black holes,

Re:Bad joke.

[Ba3r]

If you actually looked at the map, and rtfa, you would see that it is not a navigational map, but rather an attempt to juxtapose our insignficance in the observable universe, and our absolute significance in being the point of observation of the universe.

"Objects close to us may be inconsequential in terms of the whole universe but they are important to us," (Dr. Gott, from the article)

But then again, your stunning cognitive ability to discredit this 'map' without even understanding why it was done, shoul

Re:I've noticed you troll/flame a lot

[gui_tarzan2000]

...educated id 10 t? I looked into taking the Mensa test once. Then I realized that I really don't want to think that hard so I found the nearest comic book, grabbed a Pringle's can and a Mt. Dew and all of a sudden an incredible feeling of comfort rushed over me!

"Report from the NEA: public school officials are elated! One administrator says: 'since we eliminated tests there is no more prayer in school!'. "

Re:I've noticed you troll/flame a lot

[IdleTime]

I took the test, scored enough to be accepted but declined. I saw too many members with the same attitude as the Bad Joke poster and I don't like it.

Re:WMAP

[anubi]

It is the Wilkinson Microwave Anisortopy Probe.

Its in the LaGrange L2 point, opposite the earth from the sun.. ( so earth shields it from sunlight and solar interference, I suppose. ). Anyway, its mission is to map the picture of the Universe as seen by microwave radiation.

Here's some links courtesy of Google... [google.com]

Re:I have a major complaint

[ChipMonk]

You're forgetting that the farther away you search, the farther back in time you see. What you observe a foot away from your eyes is roughly one nanosecond old. The events we see on the sun really occurred about seven minutes ago. And, somewhere waaaaaay out there, is the origin of some (very old) remnants of the Big Bang, which are just now reaching us.

There is the possibility that material from some other Big Crunch fed into what became our Big Bang, but its quantities and properties have nothing to do with our existence. For all intents and purposes, there is nothing "beyond" the Big Bang. And if there was, we are completely unable to observe it.