Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: We live in the era of humanity when most of our Universe is being mapped. To help understand these maps, astronomers computationally estimate the appearance of several possible candidate universes, to which maps of the real Universe can be compared. Pictured above is a slice through one of these artificial universes, displayed so that each part of the universe is seen at the same time after the Big Bang. The above map corresponds to an area nearly ten billion light years across. Highlighted in red are filaments that each contain thousands of galaxies, while darker regions are nearly devoid of galaxies. Our good-sized Milky Way Galaxy would hardly be visible on this map.

在我們所生活的人類時代，大部分宇宙正在被繪製成圖。 為了協助理解這些宇宙圖，天文學家透過計算來評估幾個可能的候選宇宙的外觀，然後再與真實的宇宙圖比較。 上圖是這些人造宇宙之一的切片，所顯示宇宙的每一部分，都在大爆炸後的同一時間。 上圖對應一個跨度將近100億光年的區域。 紅色突顯由數千個星系聚成的細絲，而較暗的區域則幾乎沒有星系。 在這幅圖裡，幾乎看不到我們的龐大銀河系。