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