The universe is a big place. Strictly speaking, it’s the biggest place there is. And since so many bits of it are so far away from us, it’s hard to get a sense of the overall structure. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been working hard to detect and measure everything out there it possibly can, and the latest release is a breathtaking 3D map.
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This particular data release (covering about a third of the portion of the sky visible to the SDSS’s dedicated 2.5-meter telescope) features 535,995 newly observed galaxies, 102,100 quasars, and 116,474 stars. Whoa. And this is what it looks like if you fly though it at a quadrillion times the speed of light:
via DVICE
