Researchers 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.
Telescope design, funding, and construction is a long long process, longer than any administration, and there are some truly wonderful telescopes coming online right now.
The Nancy Grace Roman telescope is scheduled to launch in 9 days, on August 30. She was known as the Mother of the Hubble telescope, and the Roman telescope will be able to cover something like 100x the area of sky at the same detail as the Hubble. This will allow surveying a huge fraction of the sky compared to what Hubble could do. (Great video summary here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EiTby2Lku8 )
The European Space Agency also launched Euclid last year, which is super focused on surveying huge amounts of the sky.
The damage being done to the US will take about a decade to fully play out. We are eating our seed corn right now, because management is a rentier who doesn't understand productive expansion of the economy through innovation. If the damage persists, we will be lapped by other nations. Europe isn't quite ready to zoom forward, but China and India are very happy to.
> deteriorating strategic situation. The big money will be going into defense and economic sovereignty
That's not incidental, but a situation pushed for by people that will benefit from defense spending and from giving ordinary people's money (via taxes and protectionism) to wealthy, second-rate corporations.
It's obviously undesirable to the great majority, and we can make a different situation if we want to.
Telescopes are related to spy satellites, something that will remain in high demand. The telescopes provide a good cover story for international press.
The 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.
Not 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.
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…
That'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.
I 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?
They do this mostly with spectroscopy, breaking out the light by frequency. The longer the light has been travelling, the more frequency shifts into redder frequencies, because the universe is continually expanding.
But those distances are all built on top of the cosmic distance ladder (Terence Tao explaining on 3blue1brown)
There 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.
I 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.
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]
I 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.
back 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!
Researchers 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.
Telescope design, funding, and construction is a long long process, longer than any administration, and there are some truly wonderful telescopes coming online right now.
The Nancy Grace Roman telescope is scheduled to launch in 9 days, on August 30. She was known as the Mother of the Hubble telescope, and the Roman telescope will be able to cover something like 100x the area of sky at the same detail as the Hubble. This will allow surveying a huge fraction of the sky compared to what Hubble could do. (Great video summary here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EiTby2Lku8 )
The European Space Agency also launched Euclid last year, which is super focused on surveying huge amounts of the sky.
The damage being done to the US will take about a decade to fully play out. We are eating our seed corn right now, because management is a rentier who doesn't understand productive expansion of the economy through innovation. If the damage persists, we will be lapped by other nations. Europe isn't quite ready to zoom forward, but China and India are very happy to.
> deteriorating strategic situation. The big money will be going into defense and economic sovereignty
That's not incidental, but a situation pushed for by people that will benefit from defense spending and from giving ordinary people's money (via taxes and protectionism) to wealthy, second-rate corporations.
It's obviously undesirable to the great majority, and we can make a different situation if we want to.
Telescopes are related to spy satellites, something that will remain in high demand. The telescopes provide a good cover story for international press.
The 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.
Wasn't the Hubble telescope a spare from the surveillance satellite program that they basically just turned towards space?
Not 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.
I knew the universe was nothing but a brick wall, now we have proof!
https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=80.3728&dec=-69.4497&lay...
/jk
Maybe we should replace the term “cosmological horizon” by “cosmological brick wall”.
I'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…
And we can only look as far as the CMB. The universe might be gazillion times larger beyond that, or, indeed, infinitely large.
That'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.
It’s 2D in the same sense as a 2D map of the world (Earth).
It's 2D because it's the surface of a sphere.
I 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?
They do this mostly with spectroscopy, breaking out the light by frequency. The longer the light has been travelling, the more frequency shifts into redder frequencies, because the universe is continually expanding.
But those distances are all built on top of the cosmic distance ladder (Terence Tao explaining on 3blue1brown)
https://youtu.be/YdOXS_9_P4U?is=jbkFbwWKgbn3yOjq
Maps like DESI add the 3d distances.
https://www.desi.lbl.gov/education-outreach/interactive-visu...
Celestia might be what you're looking for.
There 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.
I think it is 2D because the universe is not that thick?
I 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.
For 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
Oh this is cool! Google Space could soon be an app :) https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/
And here I thought this was the biggest 2D map.
https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/01/a-logarithmic-map-of-...
It’s only 9734 by 9734 pixels [0]. The DESI LIS map is roughly 60,000 times larger.
[0] https://payhip.com/b/Z9JQ
I wonder how many of the red points/stars are black hole stars[1]
[1] https://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-discover-brand-new-typ...
is there anyway to download the entire map, and play with it locally
5.6 trillion pixels uncompressed is somewhere in the range of 16TB
but check out https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/#PGC3097688 and https://datalab.noirlab.edu/data/legacy-surveys
This is beautiful and terrifying. Thank you for sharing.
Seems like some of the most interesting objects are missing or have weird red/green artifacts, why is that?
getting a 502
Just tell me the Universe is a simulation please...
Wow, this is humbling
In what ways? Galaxies are just fat fucks, they don't do no philosophy, play piano or shitpost.
If 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".
Hm, that's a good thing to consider - are there portions of the sky in which stars align into a coherent text?
Just 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
Feed it to an LLM to see what it hallucinates
I 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.
make sure you watch the youtube video embedded in the website, it adds some real perspective of just how massive this is
Yep and the examples are really cool!
Not this data, but from nearby 3D star map with rotations:
https://www.ouruboroi.com/moire3
Absolutely crazy
i note the hyperspace bypass is missing
Could this be used for a new Elitelike game?
Not many people know this, but the actual universe is 3D, so this map is misleading.
why 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
back 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!
Holy shit, this is very impressive
vaguely 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/
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