Large Scale Structure of the Universe
(midwest.social)
Innerworld
AstronomyThis is a map of the universe. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona, has finished its five-year survey. It observed more than 47 million galaxies and quasars and created a 3D map centered on the Earth. Today's featured image shows a thin slice of these data: the black gaps indicate where our Galaxy obscures distant objects. The feathery web in the inset shows the large scale structure of the universe. Light of the most distant galaxies shown here travelled for 11 billion years to reach the Earth. Galaxies cluster throughout cosmic history under the competing influences of gravity and dark energy, responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. Analysis of early DESI results hinted at the possibility that dark energy, described as a cosmological constant by Albert Einstein, may not be constant after all. But we still have to wait for the analysis of the now complete dataset. The nature of dark energy is the biggest mystery of cosmology.
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Douglas Adams, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy]
Very insane that we as a species (very very very small) were able to survey the (observable) universe and its structure (very very very big, far bigger than the biggest big we can big of) to such an accurate detail.
Here are the high resolution sources up to a 25MB JPEG and 99MB TIF: https://noirlab.edu/public/images/archive/search/?adv=&subject_name=DESI
Cool, my first take is fractal dust with some sort of bubble superstructure.
It’s amazing that what looks like dense clusters at this scale are stars still separated by, um, astronomically large distances. It’s also amazing to see this overall clustering operating at those scales. The sparse areas are unfathomably empty.
It reminds me of patterns in soil erosion, with gravity concentrating larger and larger flows of water and correspondingly deeper stream cuts. Also self-similarity at vastly different scales.
~~stars~~ galaxies
Thanks for posting that link. Truly mind-blowing results and it's cool to see it visualized.
with how big space is. does the map determine if the location is where the thing currently are or just everything we can see at this time.
the latter. the map looks different further away from the center of the circle because further away = earlier time. if they attempted to compensate for how things far away have changed since the light was emitted, the map would look uniform.
Because of relativity, there is no difference.
Is there a limit at how often my mind can be blown?!
