Stunning New Universe Fly-Through Really Puts Things Into Perspective

A stunning new video lets viewers tour the universe at superluminal speed. Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins, Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium, and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins reconstructed the layout of 400,000 galaxies based on information from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7:

“Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth. SDSS Data Release 9 from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Berkeley Lab scientists, includes spectroscopic data for well over half a million galaxies at redshifts up to 0.8 — roughly 7 billion light years distant — and over a hundred thousand quasars to redshift 3.0 and beyond.”