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Logarithmic Maps of the Universe (2005) (princeton.edu)
139 points by autoditype on Feb 24, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 34 comments



I got one of these printed by a banner-printing service who could do prints two metres tall and 60 cm wide or something. It came back with the bottom third blank - there are so many objects in the postscript file, it crashed their rasteriser. This was a cheap service, so they didn't check it before printing it out.

I rasterised it in software, and sent them the image, and that was fine.


If anyone looked for Andromeda and couldn't find it: M31 is Andromeda and it's around 765 kiloparsecs away.


The lower bound on this map’s logarithmic scale is ~1000 km. I’d love to see it extended down to the Planck length.


Not quite the same concept, but close: https://htwins.net/scale2/


Yeah, and then the origin should be moved to somewhere on the surface of the earth, instead of it's core.


compare (1957) https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Boeke/frames.html "The Universe in 40 jumps"

10e-13 cm to 10e26 cm


what do you mean? There's no "origin" on a logarithmic map, it's infinite both ways


The map is relative to one location. You don’t want to see « rocks » and « rocks » for any distance smaller than 6000km, you want to see everyday objects. So you want the origin to be on earth surface


ok, I get it. It could be centered on a cell of your own body!



Yes! Maybe centered on an up quark in a proton of a carbon atom in the DNA in the nucleus of a brain cell.


Neat map.

The page's link to the journal article is broken. The abstract can be viewed on NASA's ADS[0] or directly via the DOI link[1] (which connects to the current home of the Astrophysical Journal).

[0] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005ApJ...624..463G/abstra...

[1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/link_gateway/2005ApJ...624..46...


And here's the corrected arXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0310571


Can someone ELI15 the horizontal axis to me (24h..6h)?


The "longitude" of astronomy is called "right ascension" and is traditionally counted as a 24 hour circle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_ascension


Why is there a band of decelerating matter right near the top? I thought it was all accelerating outwards?

Also what's the gap between the blue bits?


The early universe's expansion was not accelerating, as the early universe was not dominated by dark energy. I don't know off the top of my head exactly when that changed, but z=0.76 seems about right. So I'm pretty sure that is what that is.

The reason the dominant form of matter changes is fairly simple. As the universe expands, the amount of matter doesn't change, so the matter density goes as 1/r^3. The amount or radiation goes as 1/r^4 as there is an extra loss of energy due to redshifting (E = hc/wavelength). Dark energy though is (we think) a constant, so as the universe expands, the amount of it stays constant.


That took a long time to process! What's z? Your username checks out :-)


The gap is part of the universe we have trouble seeing because it is obscured by Milky Way.


It is interesting to see that the biggest distance, in terms of orders of magnitude, is between Sol system and nearest stars.


I would like to see a map of the universe scaled by population, similar to http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2016/


Opening that link, I just get presented with a login page.


Your browser is probably redirecting to the broken HTTPS version.

https://www.businessinsider.com/2016-election-results-maps-p... has the same maps.


See also https://xkcd.com/482 (2008)


I wonder how the distances to the solar system objects were chosen? If it was the average distance from earth, shouldn't sun be closest? I guess it is maybe the shortest possible distance?


I think it was taken at a particular time. If it were the closest, venus would be closer than the sun.

Skimming the paper it looks like it was the positions in Aug 2003


I’d love to see a logarithmic map of the world, too.



Thank you. That is a very strange way to look at the Earth.


Thank you!!! I've been looking for something like this for a while, I'm so glad to see someone actually did it!


Wow. That feels like living in an O'Neill cylinder.


Challenge: find your home logarithmically.


this is amazing!


How about a 3d model of the universe, inverted, say, in the (model) earth's surface?




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