Still trying to find your place in the world? How about the universe?
An international team of astronomers and astrophysicists have created a video spotlighting their new 3-D map of the known universe. The map was created from a collection of galaxy redshifts -- observations of light emitted from galaxies as they move away from the earth.
"In terms of moving -- pardon the pun -- pictures, this is by far the best I have seen among numerous motion pictures showing where we are at, literally and figuratively, in the biggest picture of all," Ian Steer, co-leader of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database of galaxy Distances, commented on the video on Vimeo.
As seen in the video, the map shows the location of all the visible galaxies in our universe as far away as 340 million light-years.
Impressive, for sure. But as it turns out , that's only a fraction of the universe.
“We actually don’t know how big the whole universe is,” Dr. R. Brent Tully, astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu, Hawaii, told the Los Angeles Times. “What we talk about is the universe within our horizon, the travel time of light, and that’s been traveling to us since 14 billion years."
So how far is this map's reach into the universe? "Tiny. About 1 part in 100 million of the universe within our horizon," Dr. Tully told The Huffington Post in an email.
But this map is just the beginning. According to Dr. Tully, "This first video is really just a test of possibilities. We already have data in hand to extend the maps to 600 million light years at all three levels."
Watch the video here:
The video was presented at the "Cosmic Flows -- Observations and Simulations" conference. A paper about the video has been submitted to the Astronomical Journal and can be read here.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post misstated Ian Steer's job title. We regret the error.
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