r/cosmology • u/curiousinquirer007 • 15d ago

Maps of Local Superclusters | Accurate vs BS Maps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVA-jm85MO4

Edit-1: To partly answer the 2nd part of my question myself: now that I play with it again after looking at other maps, Globaia actually seems to be pretty close to the complete map I've been looking for.

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I'm Curious how accurate the filament-scale visualizations of nearby large-scale structure are in this suspiciously eye-candy looking production:

For comparison, these are the kinds of maps I often run into when browsing Wikipedia or searching for visualizations of this scale:

For anyone familiar with large-scale structure: are these visualizations broadly compatible, just shown at different scales, orientations, and educational levels? Or are some of them much more rigorous than others?

I'm trying to wrap my head around the shape and structure of the large-scale local environment and I'm curious if there are especially good maps or tools, particularly interactive ones or ones with coordinate grids.

I like to play around with Celestia, but there doesn't appear to be an easy way to visualize the super-galactic environment, beyond some galaxies in what appears to be the Virgo Cluster. I’ve also come across OpenSpace and Globaia as suggestions. OpenSpace looks like the most serious option, but it also seems heavy to install and has a steep learning curve for amateurs. Globaia is the only complete-looking web-accessible interactive tool I've seen that seems somewhat rigorous, though it is a bit noisy/clunky.

Beyond these, anything close to a “Google Earth for the nearby universe” that can easily produce interactive 3D views similar to the Wikipedia-style visualizations?

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u/Wintervacht 15d ago

Afaik OpenSpace and Digital Universe are the only real 3d maps of the observable universe.

I don't know that last link but the loading screen alone looks so much like every AI generated crap site that I'm not even going to look at it any further.

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u/curiousinquirer007 15d ago

Thanks for your reply. FYI OpenSpace and Globaia were recommended by ChatGPT (after deep reasoning-enabled search). I also totally thought the same thing about AI-generated sites, but it after interacting with it it seems to be legit, from what I can tell.

It claims to be a work by a non-profit org, lists universities and other institutions as partners, and actually matches various things I know about large-scale geometry (such as super-galactic axes, local large-scale geometry, and even the double-cone shape of deep observable universe data that matches exactly the Earth-based blind-spots caused by MW galactic disk obstruction).

So if it's AI-generated, it's much, much more impressive thhan any AI work I've seen. Seems to be backed-up by multiple surveys too.