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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. popsci.com popular science 37