The cosmic backyard will never look the same, thanks to a new three-dimensional map — the most detailed view ever assembled out to a distance of 380 million light-years.
Covering 95 percent of the sky, the map uses dust-penetrating infrared observations to reveal features that in visible light are obscured by the Milky Way. “We get a more detailed look at major structures that are almost hidden by our galaxy, like the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster and the Norma supercluster of galaxies,” said Karen Masters of the University of Portsmouth in England. She unveiled the map, which catalogs some 45,000 galaxies, on May 25 at a meeting in Boston of the American Astronomical Society.
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