Croatian Mapster of the Universe
Croatian Astrophysicists at the edge of the Universe
with the view to the edge of space and time
Op-ed
Dr Juric's mentor was Dr. Zeljko Ivezic (read Crown/Library/Science and/or People)
NB
THE first-ever map of the universe has been unveiled. It gives a view from the Earth to the edge of space and time.
MAPSTERS OF THE UNIVERSE
Nov 20 2003
Scientists unveil road map from here to eternity
THE first-ever map of the universe has been unveiled. It gives a view from the Earth to the edge of space and time. Scientists narrowed down their mind-boggling task by focusing on a four-degree wide sliver of the sky. They took their ``snapshot' from telescopes on the equator over 24 hours on August 13.
The result stretches from the Solar System, through the Milky Way to deep space in diminishing perspective. It contains 126,625 galaxies with billions of stars.
The largest structure found in the universe a wall of galaxies 1.37 billion light years long is included.
The map project the brainchild of American astro-physicist Prof Richard Gott also shows the 10 brightest stars in our sky.
The nearest to Earth, the Proxima Centauri, is four light years away.
Astronauts traveling by rocket would be dead 155,000 years before they arrived. In making the map, Professor Gott had to overcome the problem of sheer scale.
The most distant object that observed is a star about 155,000 billion, billion miles away.
If he shrank such a distance to fit on a page, the Milky Way would be a dot smaller than a speck of dust. But if our galaxy was drawn to fit a page, he would need 62 miles of paper to show the most distant star. So Professor Gott, of Princeton University, and colleague Dr Mario Juric devised a special scale based on the Earth's 3963-mile radius.
Their dream is to produce a version of the map, featured inNew Scientist magazine, to display in a 20-storey elevator shaft.
It would be viewed by traveling up and down in a glass-walled lift. Each floor would show objects 10 times further away than on the floor below, with the beginning of the universe at the top.
