Posted on 06/14/2011 3:03:47 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Explanation: What does the universe nearby look like? This plot shows nearly 50,000 galaxies in the nearby universe detected by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) in infrared light. The resulting image is anincredible tapestry of galaxies that provides limits on how the universe formed and evolved. The dark band across the image center is blocked by dust in the plane of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Away from the Galactic plane, however, each dot represents a galaxy, color coded to indicate distance. Bluer dots represent the nearer galaxies in the 2MASS survey, while redder dots indicating the more distant survey galaxies that lie at a redshift near 0.1. Named structures are annotated around the edges. Many galaxies are gravitationally bound together to form clusters, which themselves are loosely bound into superclusters, which in turn are sometimes seen to align over even larger scale structures.
(Excerpt) Read more at 129.164.179.22 ...
[Credit: 2MASS, T. H. Jarrett, J. Carpenter, & R. Hurt]
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Off topic, but every time I sit and really think about that picture, I can’t help but think of Eco nuts and how ‘important’ they believe their work is.
Considering the Earth is about the size of a quark in relation to that graph, methinks their self-image is vastly ahem... inflated.
See the picture on my homepage, and open it in a new window.
Be amazed!
Anyone that isn’t amazed would be nuts. And the human race thinks it knows so much... About the only thing I can imagine larger is our collective arrogance as a species.
Nearby Universe?!? My dictionary defines universe as "All existing matter and space considered as a whole; the cosmos." Has this definition 'slipped' or is it misused? I have heard terms like 'Super-Group' and "Super Bubble" used for groupings of galaxies but I thought that Universe was the ultimate, a unique term referring to EVERYTHING!
Would like to see it. Can you post it here?
With the advent of the Multi-verse theories, the Universe is not quite as Uni as it use to be.
And remember, everything is relative to the observer, so, we actually are the center of the universe, as we see it.
Wow. It’s hard for me to get my puny human brain around just how vast the Universe is.
I'll post a link to it instead, which, if you click on, will open the image in a new window. You may have to click on the image again to enlarge it to full size. Here goes:
At the local museum, there’s a big rotating Earth display (basically, a geographic globe, six or so feet in diameter), which was brought over from the old museum to this new building. Not sure it’s still there, but they used to have a white ball representing the Moon, and it was visible at the far end of the big main hall, and it was all at scale. The distances from galaxy to galaxy are so enormous, it would be difficult at best to do this, not least because of the need to shrink the galaxies and simulating billions of stars in each one. It’s even difficult (at best) to scale our galaxy showing our little Solar System. I still need to walk to the store a lot more than I do...
It refers to the stuff nearby, that’s all.
But it is a piffle compared to the creator of matter/gravity/space/time itself.
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