Planck-style all-sky map

The Cosmic Microwave Background

The oldest light there is — released 380,000 years after the Big Bang, stretched over 13.8 billion years into microwaves. Tiny temperature ripples, one part in 100,000, are the seeds every galaxy you passed grew from.

The Milky Way's heart

Sagittarius A*

The supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy — four million Suns inside a sphere you could fit within Mercury's orbit. Shown here with real ray-traced light-bending: the glowing disk behind it is wrapped over the top and under the bottom by gravity, the way Kip Thorne's equations bent it for Interstellar's Gargantua.

Schwarzschild geodesic ray-trace · light paths integrated in curved spacetime · in the style of Thorne & Double Negative (2014)

    Particle simulation · illustrative
    ~4.5 billion years from now

    Andromeda meets the Milky Way

    Our galaxy and Andromeda are falling toward each other at ~110 km/s. They will sweep through one another, fling out long tidal tails, fall back, and after several passes merge into a single elliptical galaxy — sometimes nicknamed “Milkomeda”.

    • Almost no stars actually collide — galaxies are overwhelmingly empty space
    • The Sun will likely be flung to a new orbit, but should survive intact
    • The whole merger plays out over roughly a billion years
    A tour of the stars

    The Stellar Zoo

    From a city-sized neutron star to a hypergiant that would swallow Saturn — every star here is drawn to true relative size on a logarithmic scale, tinted by its real blackbody colour. Drag to look around.

    Type II core-collapse · staged to real physics · ending on SN 1054 / the Crab Nebula
    Progenitor

    Supernova

    The Universe
    Free-flight model
    Scale
    Solar System

    Drag orbit · Scroll zoom · Click fly to · Right-drag pan

    The Universe,
    to scale

    Fly from the moons of Jupiter to the cosmic web. Real planets, real stars, real distances — click anything to soar to it, scroll to change scale by a trillion.

    🖱 Drag to orbit🔍 Scroll to zoom👆 Click to travel