The universe is a big place. Strictly speaking, it’s the biggest place there is. And since so many bits of it are so far away from us, it’s hard to get a sense of the overall structure. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been working hard to detect and measure everything out there it possibly can, and the latest release is a breathtaking 3D map.
It’s essentially impossible for us to wrap our puny little brains around the scale of this video. We’re flying past galaxies like they’re dandelion seeds, but each one is made up of hundreds of millions of stars, and many of those stars probably have planetary systems of their own. Even if you feel like the probability for life somewhere else in the universe is very, very small, the sheer ginormosity of what we’re dealing with virtually assures that somewhere out there, alien life exists.
Via Futurity
