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