100,000 Stars

NOTHING QUITE LIKE SOME UNIVERSAL PERSPECTIVE. stars.chromeexperiments.com

An experiment by the terrific Chrome team, 100,000 Stars explores the depth and breadth of the Milky Way galaxy via interactive graphical representations. Once you’ve landed on the site, you can click ‘play’ and be taken through an ever-expanding sequence, showing you the relative scale and distance between our planets and sun compared with the distance to the nearest star, star cluster, and so on. The demonstration is full of perspectival information and details, such as the various lengths of time it would take us to reach objects as close as the sun and as far as our nearest star; alpha Centauri. You’re also free to zoom in and out and interact as you please, spinning your point of view and clicking on any variety of stars to find out more information on them. You can also filter your view by the Spectral Index, allowing you to see just how hot some stars are.