The Universe Nearby.

What does the universe nearby look like? This plot shows over one and a half million of the brightest stars and galaxies in the nearby universe detected by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) in infrared light . The resulting image is an incredible tapestry of stars and galaxies that provides limits on how the universe formed and evolved . Across the center are stars that lie in the plane of our own Milky Way Galaxy . Away from the Galactic plane, vast majority of the dots are galaxies , color coded to indicate distance, with blue dots representing the nearest galaxies in the 2Mass survey, and red dots indicating the most distant survey galaxies that lie at a redshift near 0.1. Named structures are annotated . Many galaxies are gravitationally bound together to form clusters , which themselves are loosely bound into superclusters , which in turn are sometimes seen to align over even larger scale structures .