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- Hacker News
- 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.by layer8
- 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...
by Towaway69 - is there anyway to download the entire map, and play with it locallyby br0ceph
- 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
- I'm surprised the current US federal government is allowing its employees to publish anything with evidence the universe is >6000 years old.by walrus01
- 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?
- I think it is 2D because the universe is not that thick?by LeBit
- Celestia might be what you're looking for.by fluoridation
- 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.
- 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...
by epistasis - Seems like some of the most interesting objects are missing or have weird red/green artifacts, why is that?by pants2
- 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 because it's the surface of a sphere.by fluoridation
- It’s 2D in the same sense as a 2D map of the world (Earth).by layer8
- For 2001 fans, Atmosphères by Ligeti[1] also works very well while doom scrolling the endless canvas that is the Universe.by Towaway69
- 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
by flockonus - Maybe we should replace the term “cosmological horizon” by “cosmological brick wall”.by layer8
- 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…
by KaiMagnus - Somewhere way out there another life is looking at a similar map and feeling the same!by 1970-01-01
- And we can only look as far as the CMB. The universe might be gazillion times larger beyond that, or, indeed, infinitely large.by layer8
- 502 Bad Gateway result from
Direct link to Legacy Survey Sky Viewer: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org
- by BearOso
- 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.
by anigbrowl - Is this based off anything other than feelings?by NuclearPM
- > 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.
by mmooss - Telescopes are related to spy satellites, something that will remain in high demand. The telescopes provide a good cover story for international press.by zappb
- > Researchers expect it will remain the most comprehensive 2D map of our universe for years to come.
This is Rubin Observatory erasure
by gammarator - 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.
by epistasis