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Worlds Without End Blog

How the Angels See the Universe Posted at 11:46 AM by Jonathan McDonald

jynnantonnyx

Be sure to watch it in HD! Here’s the video description on YouTube:

This animated flight through the universe was made by Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins. There are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or in some cases their near cousins in type) derived from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7. Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth. SDSS Data Release 9 from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Berkeley Lab scientists, includes spectroscopic data for well over half a million galaxies at redshifts up to 0.8 — roughly 7 billion light years distant — and over a hundred thousand quasars to redshift 3.0 and beyond.

For more information about BOSS and the latest data release, go to http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2012/08/08/boss-sdss-dr9/.

3 Comments

Dave Post   |   11 Aug 2012 @ 14:22

What an extraordinary spread of space! Plenty of room for the Galactic Empires of the Foundation Series, Star Wars, Dune, Hitchhiker’s Guide and the Horus Heresy to spread out in all their glory. And many another besides.

whargoul   |   11 Aug 2012 @ 20:59

Truly amazing. Whenever I see stuff like this, I wonder how people can say there’s no other life out there…the numbers are just too staggering.

I wish I could turn that into a screensaver.

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