July 5, 2023
The Moon has changed phase thousands of times since the beginning of the cosmos, but only once did it shine on the night you arrived.
A Map of the Observable Universe
Birthday · July 5, 2023
A little universe, just for you
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APOD published July 5, 2023. Credit: B. Ménard & N. Shtarkman; Data: SDSS, Planck, JHU, Sloan, NASA, ESA. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What if you could see out to the edge of the observable universe? You would see galaxies, galaxies, galaxies, and then, well, quasars, which are the bright centers of distant galaxies. To expand understanding of the very largest scales that humanity can see, a map of the galaxies and quasars found by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey from 2000 to 2020 -- out to near the edge of the observable universe -- has been composed. Featured here, one wedge from this survey encompasses about 200,000 galaxies and quasars out beyond a look-back time of 12 billion years and cosmological redshift 5. Almost every dot in the nearby lower part of the illustration represents a galaxy, with redness indicating increasing redshift and distance. Similarly, almost every dot on the upper part represents a distant quasar, with blue-shaded dots being closer than red. Clearly shown among many discoveries, gravity between galaxies has caused the nearby universe to condense and become increasingly more filamentary than the distant universe. More Detailed Maps: Related to Today's APOD
Image credit: B. Ménard & N. Shtarkman; Data: SDSS, Planck, JHU, Sloan, NASA, ESA