It’s a great honor today to with you The Digital Universe, which was created for humanity really see where we are in the universe. And I think we can roll the video that we have.
[The Himalayas.]
(Music)
The horizon that we’ve evolved with has been a metaphor for the infinite: unbounded resources and capacity for disposal of waste. It wasn’t until we really left Earth, above the atmosphere and had seen the horizon bend back on itself, we could understand our planet as a limited condition. The Digital Universe has been built at the American Museum of Natural History over past 12 years. We maintain that, put that together a project to really chart the universe across all scales. What we see here are satellites around the Earth the Earth in proper registration against the universe, as we see. NASA supported work 12 years ago as part of the rebuilding of the Hayden Planetarium so that would share this with the world.
The Digital Universe is the basis of our space show productions that do — our main space shows in the dome. what you see here is the result of, actually, internships that we hosted with Linkoping in Sweden. I’ve had 12 students work on this their graduate work, and the result has been this software called Uniview a company called SCISS in Sweden. This software allows interactive use, so this actual flight path and movie we see here was actually flown live. I captured live from my laptop in a cafe called Earth Matters on the Lower East of Manhattan, where I live, and it was done as a collaborative project with Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art for an exhibit on comparative cosmology.
And so as we out, we see continuously from our planet all the way into the realm of galaxies, as we see here, light-travel time, you a sense of how far away we are. As we out, the light from these distant galaxies have taken long, we’re essentially backing up into the past. We back so far up we’re finally seeing containment around us — the afterglow of the Big Bang. This the WMAP microwave background that we see. We’ll fly outside it here, just to see this of containment. If we were outside this, it would be meaningless, in the sense as before time. But our containment of the visible universe. We know the universe is bigger than that which we see.
Coming back quickly, we see here the radio sphere that we jumped of in the beginning, but these are positions, the latest positions of exoplanets that we’ve mapped, and our here, obviously, with our own solar system. What you’re going to see — we’re going to have to in here pretty quickly between several orders of magnitude to get down to we see the solar system — these are the paths of 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 11 and Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to have left the solar system. Coming in closer, picking up Earth, orbit of Moon, and we see the Earth. This map can be updated, and can add in new data.
I know Dr. Carolyn is the camera P.I. for the Cassini mission. But here we see the complex trajectory of Cassini mission color coded for different mission phases, ingeniously so that 45 encounters with the largest moon, Titan, which is larger that the planet Mercury, the orbit into different parts of mission phase.
This software allows to come close and look at parts of this. software can also be networked between domes. We have growing user base of this, and we network domes. we can network between domes and classrooms. We’re actually sharing tours of the universe with the sub-Saharan planetarium in Ghana as well as new libraries that have been built in the ghettos Columbia and a high school in Cambodia. And the Cambodians have actually the Hayden Planetarium from their high school.
This is an image from Saturday, photographed by the Aqua satellite, through the Uniview software. So you’re seeing the edge the Earth. This is Nepal. This is, in fact, right is the valley of Lhasa, right here in Tibet. But we can the haze from fires and so forth in the Ganges valley down below in India. This Nepal and Tibet.
And just in closing, I’d just like say this beautiful world that we live on — here we see bit of the snow that some of you may have had to brave coming out — so I’d like to just say that what the world needs is a sense of being able to look at in this much larger condition now and a much larger of what home is. Because our home is the universe, and we the universe, essentially. We carry that in us. And to be able to see our context in this sense at all scales helps us all, I think, in where we are and who we are in the universe.
Thank you.