Our Expanding View of the Universe

Recently, I've started collecting Data Visualizations and Infographics about Exoplanets. You may see some of them randomly displayed in the Exoplanetology homepage. I use a third party tool called Vi.sualize.Us to make it quick and easy for me to tag images and share awesome exoplanet visualizations that i come across in the web.

For my latest entry, I'd like to share this nugget of Interactive Data Visualization about our expanding view of "The Visible Universe, Then and Now".

As you marvel at the new astronomical objects we have discovered, don't forget to compare how it looked like back then in the 1950's and how little we knew about the things around our star.

Exoplanets play a big part in the recent upgrades in how we see our universe. In just a mere decade, an entire generation of humans would realize that our earth is just one among billions and gazillions of planets out there.

Take a moment to wonder how much we have learned in such a short span of time. Was there any difference at all in how we behaved as a species? More importantly, take a moment to look into yourself and see how the new knowledge of other worlds changes your way of thinking and how you now see the world.

The Logarithmic Map of the Universe [ stars with known exoplanets highlighted ]

Just a quick post to highlight the presence of markers for the known exoplanets within this "Logarithmic Map of the Universe". The stars with known exoplanets are in the middle part of the strip. [ click the links below to access other resolutions of the map ]

In a quick glance, this map gives an idea about how far away our currently known exoplanets are, compared with other objects in the known universe.

For example, you can see that OGLE 2003-BLG-235 is the farthest from earth, and the one closest to the center of the Milky Way compared with other known exoplanet-hosting stars.

The logarithmic property of the map is best understood by taking note of the labels on the left side of the map, where the units increase from kilometers, to AU, to parsec, to kiloparsec, all the way to megaparsec--from the bottom-up of the long strip of map, to denote the distances when you look up the sky as you stand on the surface of the earth.

Links:
Logarithmic Maps of the Universe
Going Up? (Starts with a Bang)