To create the map, astronomers mined over two decades through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is a pioneering effort to record the night sky through a telescope based in New Mexico. This interactive map shows the true position and true colors of 200,000 galaxies. Each dot on the map is a galaxy, and each galaxy contains billions of stars and planets. The Milky Way is just one of those dots at the bottom of the map. Expanding the universe helps make this map even more colorful. The further away an object is, the redder it appears. The top of the map reveals the first burst of radiation emitted just after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. Map creator Brice Ménard, a professor at Johns Hopkins, said: “On this map, we’re just a speck at the bottom, just a pixel. And when I say we, I mean our galaxy, our Milky Way, which has billions of stars and planets. We’re used to seeing astronomical images that show a galaxy here, a galaxy there, or maybe a group of galaxies. But what this map shows is a very, very different scale.” “People will experience the map’s undeniable beauty and impressive scale.” “From this point at the bottom, we can map galaxies across the universe, and that says something about the power of science.”
