Download The Data- Centric Universe

Orion nebula
THE
DATA
AGE
Andromeda galaxy
Asteroid belt
cosmic expansion
To clarify the spatial relationship
between Earth and the rest of the
universe, 407,702 objects with
known distances and discovery
dates are displayed as a ring flattened to the Earth’s equator.
2011
Milky Way
Andromeda galaxy
Orion nebula
1950
51 Pegasi b
First extrasolar planet discovered
PSR 1919+21
First pulsar
Whirlpool galaxy
Uranus
Neptune
Jupiter
Vega
Nebulae
Planets
by the numbers
Comets
Venus
Extrasolar planets
Supernova 1987A
Stellar explosion remnant in nearby dwarf galaxy
Moon
Mercury
Stars
Polaris
Earth
Sun
Gliese 581 d
Habitable-planet candidate
Gap appears where
the Milky Way
obstructs our view.
Halley’s Comet
Saturn
10 light-years
100 ly
1,000 ly
Alpha Centauri
Closest star system to Earth
The DataCentric Universe
Sirius
Brightest star in the night sky
Mars
10,000 ly
100,000 ly
1 million ly
Galaxies
10 million ly
Whirlpool galaxy
How information makes the world a bigger place
100 million ly
Illustration by TULP Interactive
Before the telescope was invented in 1608, our picture of the universe
consisted of six planets, our moon, the sun and any stars we could see in the
Milky Way galaxy. But as our light-gathering capabilities have grown, so too have
the boundaries of the visible universe. In the late 1700s, William Herschel, an English
astronomer using a telescope with an 18.7-inch aperture, made the first systematic surveys
of the skies, revealing more than 2,000 distant galaxies, nebulae and other objects invisible to the
naked eye. Since then, increasingly powerful optical and radio telescopes have greatly expanded
our store of knowledge. In 1948, astronomers erected the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar
Observatory in California, and now, large-scale projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and
NASA’s Kepler mission use sensitive digital imaging and computational power to collect and analyze hundreds of terabytes of data on millions of galaxies billions of light-years from Earth. With
each additional bit of data, the universe itself grows larger.­—Mara Grunbaum
2500 B.C. The first known calendar system is established
in Mesopotamia, creating a 360-day year.
36 popular science November 2011
Sloan Great Wall of galaxies
Largest known structure in the universe
1 billion ly
Quasars
Gamma-Ray Burst 090429B
Candidate for most distant object ever observed
Most distant object in
the Hubble Deep Field
Sources: J. Richard Gott III et al., “A Map of the Universe,” The Astrophysical Journal, 624:463 (2005); Michael Vogeley and
James Zhang, Drexel University; NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, exoplanet.eu;
Sloan Digital Sky Survey; International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center; Strasbourg Astronomical Data
Center; Wolfram Mathematica AstronomicalData; SEDS.org; Catalogue of Comet Discoveries, comethunter.de
3C 273
First quasar
10 billion ly
1770 B.C. Hammurabi writes down 282 laws
prescribing civil behavior in the kingdom of Babylon.
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