We Just Got Brand New Maps of The Entire Universe

This cone-shaped telescope takes some of the most colourful images of any telescope in space, and it's just released two incredible maps of the universe. It's called SPHERE-X, and can see 102 infrared wavelengths of light. The data from it will help astronomers address big picture questions about all sorts of things, from what happened in the first few seconds after the Big Bang, all the way through to learning about where water deposits could be hiding in the Milky Way. These new maps are the first time we've seen the whole sky from SPHERE-X, and the results are very impressive. SPHERE-X launched back in March of 2025, and we saw a tantalising preview of images from the telescope in April of the same year. These were uncalibrated images though, that weren't ready to do science with, and the telescope has come a long way since then. In just six months, SPHERE-X has collected enough data to create these incredible maps, and begun its science missions. These missions include studying how galaxies have changed over the 14 billion year history of the universe, how key ingredients for life are distributed in our own galaxy, and how a dramatic event that occurred in the first billionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang has influenced the 3D distribution of hundreds of millions of galaxies. Most telescopes zoom in and take detailed images of specific objects, but SPHERE-X does the opposite, and is designed to repeatedly survey the entire sky. It even captured the interstellar object 3I Atlas, and analysed its composition, revealing a large CO2 cloud and a lack of water in the object in pretty groundbreaking observations. I'll leave a link to some news stories in the description if you want to read more about that. The SPHERE-X telescope circles the Earth about 14 and a half times a day, travelling from north to south and passing over the poles. Every day it takes about 3,600 images along one circular strip of the sky, and as the days pass and the planet moves around the sun, SPHERE-X's field of view shifts too. After six months, it's looked in every direction, capturing the entire sky in 360 degrees. This is similar to what older missions like PLANK have done too, to collect the whole sky, but there are some key differences. One of them is the wavelength of light that the telescopes can see. PLANK was microwave and SPHERE-X is infrared light. And the other one is exactly where those telescopes were. PLANK travelled over a million miles from the Earth to do its survey from a place called L2, whereas SPHERE-X is still orbiting the Earth, so it is much, much closer to us. The amazing and unique thing about this data is the number of colours, or wavelengths, that the telescope can see. It's essentially giving us 102 individual maps of the entire sky, one for each wavelength it can detect. Each infrared wavelength here provides unique information about the objects it sees, including the galaxies, stars, planet-forming regions and other cosmic objects. For example, dense clouds of dust in our galaxy, where stars and planets form, radiate brightly in some wavelengths, but are completely invisible in other wavelengths, because they emit none of that type of light. Previous all-sky surveys, like WISE and PLANK, have mapped the sky in broad bands, covering many wavelengths in each filter, so essentially seeing only a few colours. But SPHERE-X uses narrow spectral channels to get the 102 colours, effectively giving us low-resolution spectra at every point in the sky, which is quite incredible. The real power of the telescope is the huge amount of sky, all of it, that this telescope covers, while other telescopes like HUBBLE and JWST can really only image absolutely tiny patches of space in any one go. Here we're getting a wide-angle spectral sensor that connects cosmology with galaxy evolution and astrochemistry. It's pretty awesome. In practice, we got a few cool things to look at from SPHERE-X. The main image, shown here, is dominated by hot hydrogen gas in blue, and cosmic dust in red, but also includes infrared colours, chosen to highlight the presence of stars in blue, green and white. The bright feature running through the centre of the image is our Milky Way galaxy, lit up by the billions of stars within it. Above and below this central band, most of the points of light are other galaxies, in the background in the distant universe. We then got to see this awesome map broken down, essentially giving us two separate maps, each of which highlights some specific component of that main image. This first one features just the colours of light emitted by the millions of stars and galaxies that SPHERE-X can observe. Any wavelengths of light emitted by the dust and hot gas have been removed, to make the stars and galaxies more visible, giving a clean and beautiful map of our galaxy, and some of those galaxies beyond. In this second map, basically the opposite has been done, and here we're removing a lot of that starlight, and focusing on the clouds of dust and the structures they create. We're seeing hot cosmic dust and gas that's flowing through our Milky Way. Now, often this dust gets in the way of things we want to see, and is quite annoying for astronomers, but here it's the star of the show. Pun not intended, but kept in anyway. Also, these maps are stunning, but they've been downsampled to just 0.1% of the full resolution, to keep the file sizes reasonable for us mere mortals and our laptops trying to encode them into videos. The science-grade data is incredible, and way higher resolution than our phones and laptops can display, and eventually it will all be completely publicly available. One takeaway we can have here is that our Milky Way is full of the ingredients for stars and planets, and the potential for what they can form here is pretty exciting to think about. We can also check out this cool transition from one map to the other, giving us a complete panorama of the sky at the same time, and this is where I basically just get hypnotized by the beauty of it. It really drives home that the universe looks completely different, depending on what light you use to look at it. These are both infrared maps, and they already look completely different, and beyond this, there's so many other ways to look into space. From visible light to ultraviolet, radio waves, x-rays, and even gamma rays, it all teaches us something different about the universe. It's even cool to think that other life out there in the universe, if it exists, might have evolved eyes or senses that detect other types of light to our eyes, and so they may see a completely different view of the universe than we do. One other question you may have is why this map is sort of an oval shape. The sky isn't an oval after all, and I keep saying this is the entire sky. It's just because the true map is effectively the inside of a sphere. That's what SphereX can see, and that's hard to display in images and videos on flat screens. As such, this map is sort of unfolded, and the most common way to do that unfolding results in the ovally shape seen here. It's kind of like when you make a map of the Earth. Because we're taking a sphere and sort of unfolding it to a flat object, things get a little bit distorted, and the shapes are slightly different. Also remember, this is just the first map from SphereX. It takes about six months for it to image the entire sky, and it's planned to complete three more all-sky scans during its primary mission. Probably the most exciting time will come when we can merge all of those maps together, increasing the sensitivity of the measurements, and giving us the best possible maps from SphereX. When all that happens, I'll be sure to showcase it here on the channel. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that, or any of the other spacey videos we put out right here. Leave me any remaining questions you have about this down below, and thanks a lot for watching. Until next time, stay safety. I'll see you soon. Bye!