I wonder why did they put the visible spectrum on the lower end of the scale despite its frequency is higher than the upper end of the scale (it is 400-700 THZ).
The two highest frequencies (not including visible) are amazingly beautiful. Almost like a painting of a storm at sea. I would really like a poster of that.
I've always wanted a beachball printed with the cosmic microwave background, ever since I saw a cosmologist playing with one in a documentary. So far I've been unable to find anyone to sell me one.
I suspect it is to do with the stitching of various images together. As the Earth is in the way if you try to take a picture of the universe from one point, they would have had to stitch multiple images together taken from either side of the Earth. You sometimes get a similar effect when you stitch together spherical photos and then rotate the view to a slightly odd angle relative to the original shots.
I'll add up to my comment: the other wavelengths have the arc shifted, which would mean that the observation is performed from a different location or (more likely) at a different time of the year.
How are the colors mapped? For me it would make sense that the areas that appear blue lower frequencies would shift to red as you go to higher frequencies, but that is not what happens.
No, it is the view of the 'visible' universe from earth. Most of the band through the middle is the milky way but the rest is elsewhere in the universe.
It's zero percent of the universe when you take into account the finite amount of space we can see over the infinite amount of space there actually is.
It's still pretty damned amazing for an infinitesimally small part of the universe.
If by an "amount of space there actually is" you mean observable Universe, then we can see a pretty darn big chunk of it, considering that the space is mostly empty. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no way of knowing if there is an infinite space outside an observable Universe.
As far as I know, the current working model of the universe presumes an infinitely large universe. That's what all the math seems to indicate. Obviously, since the rest is not observable, nor can we ever interact with it, proving this in a tangible way is not possible.
It's just that we can only see and interact with a finite portion of this universe, and sadly, over time this portion will shrink in relative terms.
In the distant past, more of the actual universe was visible. The distances between galactic clusters was smaller.
In the vastly distant future, our galaxy might be the only one visible. The rest of space will simply be empty, light stretched out so much that it's nothing more than faint background noise.
