BOSS
esiegel | August 9, 2012"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people." -Carl Sagan
Our night sky, quite literally, is our window to the Universe.
Image credit: Miloslav Druckmuller, Brno University of Technology.
Well, it's kind of a window to the Universe. I say only "kind of" because, with the exception of those two faint, fuzzy clouds in the lower right, everything else visible in the image above is part of our own Milky Way galaxy. In fact, practically…
ksnyder | May 2, 2011What did the universe look like 11 billion years ago? Something like this:
This image is part of the largest-ever 3-D map of the distant universe, which was released yesterday by scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) at the April meeting of the American Physical Society. Just a slice of the entire map, the image shows the distribution of intergalactic hydrogen gas: red areas have more gas, blue areas have less.
Scientists usually map the universe by looking at galaxies. But this study, which was led by Brookhaven cosmologist Anže Slosar, observed how light from…