at the cosmos and the wilderness

sciencesoup:

A Flight Through the Universe

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III creates detailed 3D maps of the sky by using spectroscopic data of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. The video is so breathtaking that it deserves to be watched in high definition—it shows almost 400,000 galaxies in their actual positions, as dictated by the SDSS Data Release 7, but although it seems vast, the objects are only up to 1.3 billion light years from Earth. The very recent Data Release 9, on the other hand, includes data for over half a million galaxies up to 7 billion light years away. Since the light of distant galaxies can take billions of years to reach Earth, it’s like looking at a fossil record of the distant past, and so the SDSS team is basically tracing billions of years of the Universe’s history, which will hopefully give us a better understanding of the nature of dark energy—the mysterious force that drives the Universe’s acceleration. Encouragingly, the survey’s data appears to be consistent with current models of the structure of the Universe that account for dark energy. Though the survey ends in 2014, the SDSS aims to map a quarter of the sky, and is confident that their maps will aid us, or future generations, in solving our Universe’s mysteries.

i really like survey projects like SDSS because you literally just look at see what’s out there as much as you can, but i can’t imagine how tedious actually working on them would be @_@

that being said, look at all the galaxiiiiies

i wonder if the graphics used to represent the galaxies match the type of galaxy inferred by the spectrum, or if they randomly assigned ‘spiral’, ‘elliptical’ to save time