The Whole Universe in One Picture Wall Art

It's a picture that shows everything. The whole universe. In the foreground, the Milky Way flies through the picture like a gigantic insect. The body shimmers cobalt blue, the wings shine yellow-orange. More than 800,000 black holes sparkle in the background.

"Isn't that overwhelmingly beautiful?" Asks Peter Predehl, 70. The astrophysicist from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching can get intoxicated by the magnificent total view of the firmament, which he regards as his life's work.

He has spent the past 25 years developing a telescope that could take this photo. For a few more years Predehl wants to compete with younger people to wrest the secrets of the picture. It's about the structure of the Milky Way, the interstellar gas, but above all about the large-scale mapping of the universe.

The picture shows the sky as it would look if we had X-ray eyes. The "eRosita" space telescope is only sensitive to radiation of short wavelengths. This arises everywhere in the universe where it gets hot. »ERosita« is a specialist for the spectacular - blind to everything that happens at moderate temperatures, it only sees what glows and cracks: the shock waves of exploding stars, the powerful gravitational ovens of galaxy clusters and black holes at the star meal.

Photo Credits: Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner and the eSASS team (MPE); Eugene Churazov, Marat Gilfanov (on behalf of IKI)