Take a trip through our local universe and see the positions and movements of galaxies and clusters with this incredible new video map.
Looking like tiny islands in a vast ocean, the roughly 30,000 galaxies in this detailed map extend out to around 350 million light-years from our own Milky Way. These cosmic objects don’t float alone but tend to group together in clusters of hundreds or superclusters of thousands of galaxies. Enormous voids containing relatively little material stretch between the dense threads of galactic gas and dust.
“The complexity of what we are seeing is overwhelming,” says astronomer Helene Courtois
of the University of Lyon in France, lead author of a paper that appeared on arXiv.org on June 1, as she narrates the 17-minute video above
The research uses a visualization tool called SDvision to reveal the richness of our cosmic neighborhood. It is meant to help astronomers get more of a personal feel for the local universe, said the authors in a paper accompanying the video.
“Maps with names for features promote a familiarity and specificity that contributes to physical understanding,” the authors wrote.
The labels given to features in our cosmic neighborhood – the Fornax cluster, Perseus-Pisces, the Great Wall – sound like they came from some exotic sci-fi or fantasy novel map. (Lest you think the Zone of Avoidance is a celestial forbidden sector, it simply represents areas obscured to astronomers by the light from our Milky Way.)
By understanding the large-scale structure of the cosmos, scientists can get a better handle on dark matter and dark energy, which are the dominant forces affecting the shapes of galactic superclusters. A nice bonus is that those without a scientific background can enjoy the work and be amazed at the physical wonder of our universe.
Distances in the video are given in what might seem an odd unit of measure: kilometers per second, which is usually associated with speed. But as Edwin Hubble observed in the early 1900s, the farther a galaxy is away, the faster it is moving from us. Because defining absolute distances in the universe is a bit tricky, astronomers prefer to tell you how quickly a particular object is moving away from us.
Here, Wired presents some of the highlights from this galactic mapping project but, if you have time for it, the full 17-minute video is a fascinating watch.