The Map of Astrophysics
The map needs WebGL, which this browser is not offering. Theproject page explains what you would see.
About the map
What you are looking at
Back in 2023, and after seeing a bunch of posts on Reddit mapping different things together in graphs, I had the idea to map all people in astrophysics together in a similar way, based on who they publish papers with. Now, thanks in part to my good friend Claude, I finally had the time and space of mind to make it a reality! Using publishing data from OpenAlex, a website I only found out about in this process, I scraped together the raw data of all people who publish in astrophysics (and also a bunch of nuclear physicists, who I had to kick out). Those are plotted as little stars on the map, which I twisted into a galaxy after working out the connections between people. Of course that falsely moved some people further from each other than they should be, but I thought all those little stars should really be a galaxy.
Why does everyone look different?
To make the map a bit nicer to look at (and also because I am in stellar astrophysics) I thought it would be cool to assign everyone a class of star, based on how much that person published and is cited. Temperature means how many papers you have (red = cool = fewer papers, blue = hot = more papers) and luminosity = citations makes you a bigger star in astrophysics (heh, get it?). Anyways, please don't take this too seriously. The map mixes many people of different career stages, so everyone naturally is distributed somewhat in both papers and citations. Don't feel worse about yourself because you got a smaller star, I am just a YSO myself :). If you really feel bad about it, I built in the option to remove yourself from this map. Don't hesitate to contact me if you want to be anonymized in that way.
I can't find XYZ!
This map only includes papers from 1980 onwards, since the archives get flaky before that and I wanted to map mostly people who are currently active. Also the OpenAlex database is not perfect, and I manually had to fix many (many many many) people who were duplicated, misattributed or just plainly had a middle name. I did my best, but there are surely still many errors in this map, as is natural with such a project.Contact me if you find a mistake and I will fix it!