Welcome to the local universe
Every point of light here is a real galaxy — 43,497 of them, mapped by
real telescopes. Gravity has woven them into the cosmic web:
filaments, clusters and voids. You're inside it.
🪐 orbitdrag tumbles the web around our galaxy ·
scroll zooms · double-click levelsdrag to tumble ·
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● to fly, slide it to steer · one finger looks around
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ABOUT N / Esc
“The Cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.
We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
— Carl Sagan
THE DATA
Every point of light here is a real galaxy — typically a hundred
billion stars — from the 2MASS Redshift Survey (Huchra et al.
2012): 43,497 galaxies covering the whole sky. A galaxy's direction comes
from where we see it, good to arcseconds; its distance from its
redshift — how much the expansion of the universe has stretched
its light on the way to us. The map reaches out roughly 300 megaparsecs,
about one billion light-years in every direction from the
octahedron marking the Milky Way.
Every galaxy sits at its real-space position, the most accurate
we can place it: the redshift is corrected to the cosmic microwave
background frame and turned into a comoving distance for a standard flat
universe, cluster members are gathered to their group so the redshift
"Fingers of God" no longer smear them toward us (Tully 2015 groups), and
the large-scale infall toward the great attractors is subtracted using
the 2M++ flow model (Carrick 2015), which recovers Virgo and Coma to
their measured distances. What's left is a genuine 3D map, not a
redshift-space shadow of one.
WHAT YOU ARE SEEING
Matter at this scale is not scattered at random. Gravity has spent 13.8
billion years gathering it into the cosmic web: glowing filaments
that meet at dense knots — galaxy clusters like Virgo, Coma and Perseus —
wrapped around vast, almost empty voids. The banner at the top
tells you which of these you are flying through right now. The dark wedge
where no points appear is the Zone of Avoidance: our own galaxy's
dust hiding the universe behind it.
AND YET
The light that drew this map ended journeys of up to a billion years
inside two telescopes on mountains in Arizona and Chile. The atoms reading
this sentence were forged inside stars that died before the Sun was born.
You are not looking at the universe from outside — you are one of its
dots, inside the largest structure ever mapped, contemplated by a mind
the structure itself produced. Press W.
Data: 2MASS Redshift Survey · Huchra et al. 2012
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