Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This all-sky mosaic image from NASAs SPHEREx space telescope was collected between May and December 2025 and features a small selection of the 102 infrared colors the observatory can detect. Infrared colors are invisible to the human eye but are represented here in visible colors. The infrared colors included in these images were selected to highlight the presence of stars at short, medium, and long wavelengths of light (mapped to blue, green, and red). The bright feature running through the middle of the images is the Milky Way Galaxy, lit up by billions of stars within it. Most of the points of light above and below it are other galaxies.

Breaking the light from cosmic objects into its constituent wavelengths is a technique called spectroscopy. The image here combines many of the infrared colors seen by SPHEREx into overall representations of how the light from stars and galaxies changes across the infrared spectrum.

Spectroscopy can also be used to measure the distances to other galaxies, and SPHEREx will measure the 3D distribution of hundreds of millions of galaxies in our universe. With this new map, scientists will learn more about a dramatic cosmic event called inflation that occurred in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang. That event subtly influenced the large-scale distribution of those galaxies, and SPHERExs all-sky spectral map will lend new insight into the physics of inflation.

In order to make the file sizes smaller, the spatial resolution of this image has been reduced by a factor of one thousand from the full-resolution SPHEREx data images.

The elliptical projection used in this image encompasses the entire visible sky.

Provider: SPHEREx

Image Source: https://www.spherex.caltech.edu/image/spherex20251218b-spherex-all-sky-map-2025-stars-and-galaxies

Curator: SPHEREx at Caltech, Pasadena, CA, United States