Animated Flight Through the Universe

[Bla]

Whee.

Largest Sky Map Revealed: An Animated Flight Through the Universe

This animated flight through the universe was made by Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins. There are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or in some cases their near cousins in type) derived from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7. Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth. SDSS Data Release 9 from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Berkeley Lab scientists, includes spectroscopic data for well over half a million galaxies at redshifts up to 0.8 -- roughly 7 billion light years distant -- and over a hundred thousand quasars to redshift 3.0 and beyond.

For more information about BOSS and the latest data release, go to http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2012/08/08/boss-sdss-dr9/.

[vh]

epicute. amazingly, they only use a single 2.5m telescope

[smjjames]

And some people think we're the only planet with life on it in the galaxy or the universe even. Given the near infinite number of stars and even vaster number of planets, if it arose once, then it could certainly happen again.

[vh]

The universe is probably infinite, so unless the chance of life were 0, there should be infinite amount of life elsewhere?

If you're skeptical, using the drake equation, you can get

r=7
fp=30%
ne=0.005
fl=1e-11
fi=1e-9
fc=0.5
L=50

N=2.6e-21

that equals to 3.8e20 civilizations per galaxy, but i'll round it down to 2e20 because the milky way is pretty large compared to others. there are 1.7e11 galaxies in the observable universe, so, probably no life we can detect.

On the other hand, optimistic values would give a very different result.

[dhm794]

Cool.