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Scientists release biggest 2D map of the universe

63 points by NKosmatos 3 hours ago | 23 comments

Direct link to Legacy Survey Sky Viewer: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org

pants2 3 minutes ago

Seems like some of the most interesting objects are missing or have weird red/green artifacts, why is that?

thewanderer1983 14 minutes ago

And here I thought this was the biggest 2D map.

https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2016/01/a-logarithmic-map-of-...

doodlebugging 2 hours ago

That's impressive. Though I think there's too much space on this plane. I'm wondering whether it is actually a 2D view since it obviously isn't planar.

To paraphrase Samuel L Jackson - "I have had it with this m'f'ing space on a plane! Everybody strap in I'm about to open some f'in' windows."

Proceeds to crank open an array of telescopes to get another 3D perspective of a 4D universe so we can project it onto our 2D viewing devices as if that were reality.

Towaway69 56 minutes ago

I wonder how many of the red points/stars are black hole stars[1]

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-discover-brand-new-typ...

br0ceph 22 hours ago

is there anyway to download the entire map, and play with it locally

micromacrofoot 2 hours ago

5.6 trillion pixels uncompressed is somewhere in the range of 16TB

but check out https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/#PGC3097688 and https://datalab.noirlab.edu/data/legacy-surveys

cheesemonk66 24 minutes ago

This is beautiful and terrifying. Thank you for sharing.

Razengan 16 minutes ago

Could this be used for a new Elitelike game?

antonvs 19 minutes ago

Not many people know this, but the actual universe is 3D, so this map is misleading.

cryptolobster 7 minutes ago

Holy shit, this is very impressive

fercircularbuf 18 hours ago

Wow, this is humbling

sambapa 2 hours ago

In what ways? Galaxies are just fat fucks, they don't do no philosophy, play piano or shitpost.

Towaway69 53 minutes ago

If you squint, look at just the right portion, at just the right zoom level, the stars line up and spell out "thanks for all the fish".

sambapa 46 minutes ago

Hm, that's a good thing to consider - are there portions of the sky in which stars align into a coherent text?

Towaway69 38 minutes ago

Just gotta join the dots! ;)

Or better still, develop a traveling salesman solution for visiting each star just once.

> Bowerick Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was a being who became immortal after an accident with a few rubber bands, a liquid lunch, and a particle accelerator. After a period of total boredom, especially on Sunday afternoons, he decided to insult everyone in the entire universe in alphabetical order. [1]

So that wouldn't be just an academic exercise!

[1] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Bowerick_Wowbagger

dylan604 35 minutes ago

Feed it to an LLM to see what it hallucinates

idiotsecant 17 minutes ago

I think the odds of a character are very high, the odds of a short word are very high, the odds of a meaningful sentence are quite low, and the odds of anything more than that vanishingly small. It probably also depends on whether you're ok with viewing your assembly from an arbitrary position or if it must be from earth.

ionwake 32 minutes ago

i note the hyperspace bypass is missing

therobot24 23 hours ago

make sure you watch the youtube video embedded in the website, it adds some real perspective of just how massive this is

Snoeprol 40 minutes ago

Yep and the examples are really cool!

cwmoore 2 hours ago

Not this data, but from nearby 3D star map with rotations:

https://www.ouruboroi.com/moire3

zuzululu 58 minutes ago

why is there so many weird flat lines is that an artifact?

this is fascinating wish there was a 360 VR version of this

truly immense scale

dylan604 33 minutes ago

back when I was playing with making VR content, this is one of the first things I did by using an 8K rectilinear image from NASA. Mapped it to a sphere and lined up Polaris at the zenith, and then just had one of the best nights of stargazing I had ever had!