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Uncategorized Wednesday, June 15th 2011 at 9:14 am

This is What the Nearby Universe Looks Like

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The above plot shows around 50,000 galaxies in the nearby areas of the universe, detected by the Two Micron All Sky Survey in infrared light. The dark band in the center doesn’t mean that an oddly linear part of the universe is void of objects and we’re all just really living inside a marble that two giant aliens happen to be playing with, but it was simply blocked by dust in the Milky Way’s plane. Each dot represents a galaxy, color-coded to show distance — the bluer the color, the closer the galaxy is and the redder the color means the further away it is.

(via NASA)

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  • Anonymous

    madeshopping.net

  • Anonymous

    tinyurl.com/2a7usxg

  • Anonymous

    Wow, this is pretty darned awesome! Pardon, though, if this is a stupid question: where are we in this? At first I ASSumed Earth was in the center of the chart, but that is labelled as “Milky Way Center”. Aren’t we on the edge of the galaxy? If there’s a “You Are Here” big-red-X, I’m missing it — help?

  • Not a crazy person

    Fool, it doesn’t matter where you are in this chart. When the Old Ones come back… oh no! Yog-Sothoth, Nub Shuggarath! Ia Ia! In the walls! Oh merciful God! The three lobed burning eye!!!! Nightmare wings! A crawling chaos riding upon carrion winds! 

  • Anonymous

    Uh, yeah. Thanks.

  • E Welthorpe

    Bend over and paint a big red X on the ground in front of your feet.

    If it helps, you could paint “you are here” beneath it.

  • Anonymous

    Yeah, I should’ve know this question was troll bait. Thanks ever so much for your very effing helpful answer. Some of us are not astrophysicists, ass.

  • Vaibhav

    @leorising:disqus Your question was not stupid. Its difficult to contemplate the big picture but once we get it, we can never forget.