3D Model of the 2MASS Redshift Survey

[Vorde]

Does anyone know of a 3D model of the data from the 2MASS Survey? I have to imagine it would be incredibly easy to code, but I haven't found one.

Thank you.

 

[harcel]

It is not so very easy to code, as people have a hard time getting distances to all the objects right.

 

[Vorde]

It may just be me talking without really knowing what I'm talking about and sounding like an idiot. But couldn't you have a 3D space with all coordinates in polar form, the distance from the center (us) would be an arbitrary number but scaled by redshift and the degrees x/y specified by the position on the 2D plot?

 

[harcel]

Hi,

You would be completely right if we would have a good measure of the redshift/distance/(any other measure of the distance to us) for all objects. For some galaxies we do, for some we don't and for objects in the Milky Way these are absent (and do not correspond to distance, but only to relative velocity if present). I think that is the main reason this does not exist. For the spectroscopic sample of SDSS, for example, we do have redshifts for many objects. There are movies available of this 3D map on youtube and elsewhere on the web.

Cheers, Harcel

 

[Vorde]

Thank you, that makes sense to me.

 

[Vorde]

Just as an update to this, by complete chance I stumbled upon a website that did just what I was looking for, including the program to view a 3D model of all the galaxies in their database (400,000+). Here's the link to the page, scroll down and you will see a download link:

http://astro.uchicago.edu/cosmus/projects/sloangalaxies/

As a note, the program is super hardware demanding, I have a quad core i7 and 8 gig of RAM and it is very stuttery for me.