As a child, Brice Ménard was thrilled to admire images of stars, nebulas, and galaxies. They inspired him so much that he decided to make his vocation his career and studied astronomy. Decades later, he has created an interactive map showing the positions and true colors of 200,000 galaxies in the visible Universe, from the closest to almost the beginning of everything, the Big Bang. A completely educational and public journey through time and space that can be accessed here . The map was created based on data collected over decades by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project , which has been monitoring the visible sky since 2000. Ménard, now a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and creator of the map with computer scientist Nikita Shtarkman , says his goal is to "show everyone what the Universe is really like" and for society to understand that all the data behind this map "has led to thousands of scientific studies and discoveries." Specifically, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was an ambitious effort to capture a large portion of the night sky through the 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Every night for eight years, the telescope pointed its 120-megapixel camera at 1.5 square degrees of the sky (an area about eight times the area of the full moon), shifting its position slightly to get a wide perspective of the space in front of its lens. Related News standard Yes New data on the mysterious filaments that 'hang' from the center of our galaxy José Manuel Nieves standard Not Confirmed: these are the oldest galaxies ever seen and they existed a 'cosmic breath' ago after the Big Bang P. Biosca Ménard and Shtarkman came up with the idea of using all this information to recreate that portion of the Universe and make it 'accessible' to the human eye (and much closer to the average citizen). “It wasn’t difficult to generate the map,” Shtarkman explains in an explanatory video, “because you already have the data; the tricky part was making a good map, because you’re basically working at the largest scale available.” Thus, they created this beautiful view in which each point is not a star, but a galaxy with billions of stars and planets within it. However, among the 200,000 “portrayed,” the Milky Way is not present, because that’s the point from which we look: “To see ourselves, we would have to go outside and change our point of view,” its creators explain. Red, blue, and black: the colors of galaxies We begin the journey at the vertex pixel that symbolizes our galaxy, the Milky Way. “On this map, we are just a speck at the bottom, just one pixel,” Ménard points out. “And when I say ‘we,’ I mean our galaxy, the Milky Way, which contains billions of stars and planets.” The beginning of the journey through the Universe. The vertex is the Milky Way mapoftheuniverse.com From here we go back in time about 2 billion years, to the spiral galaxies, very similar to our cosmic neighborhood, with a light blue color. During the tour we can also choose the perspective option as we would see these galaxies in the sky (if we had such a powerful telescope and optimal viewing conditions). In the image we can see how they relate to each other in clusters. Going back about 4 billion years (and in distance) we have the elliptical galaxies in an intense yellow. They are very bright, but the stars that form them are much older than those of the spiral galaxies. View of the elliptical galaxies Mapoftheuniverse.com Around 6 billion years, red begins to take center stage: "As the Universe expands, photons are stretched and objects appear redder. This is the case with elliptical galaxies. At these distances, they appear red to us. Since we no longer detect the faintest spiral galaxies, the filamentary structure is less visible,” they explain on the website. Between 10 and 12 billion years ago, blue tinges the entire map: these are quasars, massive black holes located at the center of certain galaxies. “As they accrete surrounding gas and stars, they become extremely bright and can be seen throughout the Universe. Their light is bluish,” they explain. “Beyond this distance, galaxies are harder to see. However, we can still see quasars because they are much brighter and bluer.” The last points turn red again, since at these distances, the expansion of the Universe is so great that the blue photons from quasars are stretched and appear redder. “A little further on, we encounter a time when the Universe is filled with hydrogen gas that prevents the propagation of the visible light we could observe today.” This era is called the 'dark ages.' And then there's the orange, blue, and white band, which is an actual photograph of the first flash of light emitted shortly after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. "This light has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe and reaches us in the form of radio waves. It's called the Cosmic Microwave Background," the authors note. MORE INFORMATION news No Elon Musk announces that his Neuralink brain chip will begin human testing in 6 months news Yes An asteroid like the one that killed the dinosaurs caused a megatsunami on Mars Ménard hopes that, in addition to showing the universe in all its beauty, the interactive map will demonstrate the breathtaking scale of the universe. "We are used to seeing astronomical images that show a galaxy here, a galaxy there, or perhaps a group of galaxies. But what this map shows is a very, very different scale. From this point at the bottom, we can map galaxies throughout the Universe, and that says something about the power of science."
