Journey through the universe
Dive from Earth into a glacial lake, through a flake of mica to a single atom and a proton, then out past the planets and the Milky Way to the cosmic web.
A quark
A hundredth of a femtometre, and the quark is still a point. Round it, gluons and pairs of quarks and antiquarks come and go.
Looked at this finely, a proton is more than three quarks: a sea of gluons and short-lived quark–antiquark pairs, together called partons, comes and goes between them, and the finer the look, the more of them there are. The quark itself is still a point: the electron–proton collider HERA looked ten times finer than this, to a thousandth of a femtometre, and found quarks no bigger than about half that, if they have a size at all. Quarks differ hugely in mass, a top quark weighing nearly as much as an atom of gold, yet every one is a point. Physics expects its theories to give out near the Planck length, 10⁻³⁵ metres, eighteen powers of ten further down. This is as far down as the journey goes.
What you’re seeing: Not an image: no experiment sees partons in a place. The quark is drawn as a point, as every measurement finds it, the gluons round it as soft glows and each pair as two points joined by a thread; their places, numbers and colours are illustrative. A real one lasts about as long as light takes to cross it; here they are slowed far down.
A proton
Three quarks, bound so tightly by the strong force that none has ever been seen alone.
A proton is about 0.84 femtometres in radius. Inside it two up quarks, of charge +2/3 each, and one down quark, of −1/3, together +1, are bound by gluons, whose field is pulled into a tube between them when they move apart. Pull one far enough and the tube does not let go: it snaps, its energy becoming a new quark and antiquark, so what comes out is a new particle, never a lone quark. The quarks’ own masses make up about one percent of the proton’s; nearly all the rest is the energy of the field.
What you’re seeing: Drawn, not computed. The quarks are points and the field between them amber, gathered into a Y when they spread apart and into a filled triangle when they draw close, as lattice calculations find for quarks held still. Red, green and blue stand for the quarks’ colour charge, passed between them by gluons. Real quarks move at nearly the speed of light and cross the proton in under 10⁻²³ seconds; here they are slowed far down so they can be seen.
The nucleus
The oxygen’s nucleus: eight protons and eight neutrons, a few femtometres across.
Nearly all of the atom’s mass is here, 99.97 percent of it, in a ball whose charge reaches out about 2.7 femtometres. The strong force holds the protons together against their electric repulsion; it reaches only about as far as their neighbours. Its excited states hint that the nucleons gather in four groups of two protons and two neutrons, like the nuclei of helium: the stars build oxygen by fusing helium onto carbon.
What you’re seeing: The nucleus’s size is measured; its nucleons are drawn packed into a ball, their places illustrative. Protons are drawn amber and neutrons steel grey. Real nucleons move at about a fifth of the speed of light; here they churn far slower.
Inside the atom
Within the electron cloud, almost nothing: the nucleus is a speck tens of thousands of times smaller than the atom.
Of oxygen’s eight electrons, two crowd close round the nucleus and six spread out to make its bonds. Even the inner two stay, on average, thousands of times the nucleus’s radius away from it. If the atom were a cathedral, its nucleus would be a grain of sand at the middle.
What you’re seeing: The same computed cloud seen from within: so deep inside its inner shell, the electrons are an even, faint haze, and the nucleus is still too small to show as more than a point of light.
An oxygen atom
One oxygen of the mica’s face: an atom is not a bead but a cloud of electrons.
This oxygen joins two of the face’s tetrahedra, bound to a silicon on either side. An atom has no edge: its electrons are spread in a cloud, densest at the centre and thinning out over about a tenth of a nanometre, and where two atoms bond, their clouds overlap. Every atom trembles with the heat, by about a hundredth of a nanometre.
What you’re seeing: This oxygen’s electron cloud as its density, computed for a free atom, not measured in the crystal; bonds would pull it a little out of round. Round it, the face stays as the force microscope sees it. The trembling is drawn at the size crystallography measures in mica, slowed down many times, and stilled as the camera closes in.
The crystal
Rings of six, every corner an oxygen: the face of the mica is a sheet of linked silicon tetrahedra.
Each silicon sits in a tetrahedron of four oxygens, and the tetrahedra share corners into a sheet of six-sided rings, their pattern repeating every 0.52 nanometres. In one tetrahedron of four, aluminium stands in for silicon, and the charge it leaves short is made up by potassium ions in the rings’ hollows, which hold the layers together. Split a flake, and about half the potassium stays on each face.
What you’re seeing: An idealised muscovite face as an atomic force microscope shows it in water: the tip is too blunt to part the oxygens, so they merge into one bright network round dark hollows, and the potassium, mostly washed off, is a faint rise in a few of them. Modelled, not scanned: atoms stand where the measured crystal structure puts them, aluminium and potassium at random in their measured share.
Terraces
Felt with a fine tip, the flat face turns out to be terraces. Each step is the edge of one layer of the crystal, a nanometre thick.
A layer of mica is a sandwich: two sheets of silicon tetrahedra with a sheet of aluminium between them, held to the next layer by potassium. That is the weakest link in the crystal, so the glacier split the flake along its layers again and again, and the face it left is almost flat: wide terraces, each a nanometre above or below the next, their edges running straight along the crystal’s rows and turning at its angles. Mica is so flat that it is what microscopists lay molecules on when they want to see them.
What you’re seeing: Drawn as an atomic force microscope shows a surface: a fine tip feels its height, and lower ground is darker. Modelled, not imaged: the steps are one layer high and a few hundred nanometres apart, straight along the crystal’s rows with jogs at sixty degrees, placed at random.
The flake’s face
A micrometre of the flake’s face, flat as glass, edged by the sheets it is made of.
The flake is a stack of sheets, each split a little short of the one below, so its face falls away in stairs towards the rim. Light cannot tell apart anything smaller than about a quarter of a micrometre, so here the face is seen by electrons; its finest steps, one layer of the crystal high, are too low even for them.
What you’re seeing: The same model as a scanning electron microscope shows it: grey, tinted faintly as published micrographs often are, each sheet in a muted shade of its colour in light. Where a sheet ends, its top edge glows, and its broken wall is lit on the side facing the detector and shadowed on the other.
A flake of mica
One grain of the rock flour: a flake of mica seven micrometres across and less than half of one thick.
Glaciers grind the granite and gneiss of the mountains into flour, and mica, which splits into thin plates, gives some of its flattest grains. Thin and flat, they sink so slowly that the lake’s summer water stays milky with them.
What you’re seeing: A 3D model of muscovite, the commonest light mica, not a photograph; its size and outline are chosen. Clear as glass, it shows by its edges and relief, as in a light microscope with interference contrast. The pale colours are light reflected from its sheets, as on a soap bubble, brightest where a sheet has lifted off the one below; really a few percent of the light, here brightened.
Rock flour
A tenth of a millimetre of lake water: grains of rock ground by glaciers drift among single-celled algae and diatoms, the glass-shelled kind.
In summer a millilitre of the lake’s upper water holds about 50 million mineral grains between a tenth of a micrometre and two micrometres across: clays and micas, feldspar, chlorite and quartz. The green cell rowing with two flagella is an alga, Chlamydomonas, its chloroplast cupped round the pyrenoid where it fixes carbon. The round glass boxes are diatoms of the genus Cyclotella, common in nutrient-poor lakes, each living in a shell of silica with golden-brown chloroplasts inside.
What you’re seeing: A 3D model, not a photograph, drawn as a microscope shows it in bright field with interference contrast. The grains follow the measured mix of sizes; the cells are set close together for the picture, where in the lake each would have a drop or more to itself. The alga’s flagella beat fifty times slower than in life.
Under the surface
Just under the surface. The water’s milky turquoise is rock dust, each grain far too small to see from here, lit by sunlight focused by the waves.
The ripples on the surface act as lenses: they focus the sunlight into rays that shift with every wave, and the grains scatter it into the turquoise haze. The animal drifting through is a rotifer, Keratella, a few tenths of a millimetre long: it sweeps algae into its mouth with a crown of beating hairs, which gave rotifers their name, ‘wheel-bearers’.
What you’re seeing: A 3D model, not a photograph; the water’s colour is taken from the aerial photographs. The waves are modelled on measured wind-driven slopes and slowed down as you close in, like a high-speed camera; the glints and the rays are the Sun’s light through them. The clouds they reflect are placed overhead by hand, and the rotifers are drawn.
The surface
A metre of open water from above. Every glint is a wave’s facet tilted just right to mirror the Sun.
Ripples shorter than about two centimetres are held up not by gravity but by surface tension, the pull between water molecules at the top; a breath of wind raises them and they die away within seconds. In winter, with the rock dust settled, the lake turns clear blue with a hint of green: clear water swallows red light within a few metres, so the deeper the light goes before it comes back, the bluer it is.
What you’re seeing: A 3D model, not a photograph; the water’s colour is taken from the aerial photographs. The waves are modelled on measured wind-driven slopes, and the glints are the Sun’s light off them.
A glacial lake
A lake in a mountain valley, fed by glaciers: its rivers bring in some 300,000 tonnes of ground rock a year, which keeps the water milky turquoise.
The glaciers grind the rock into dust as fine as flour, and their meltwater carries it down. Held in the water, it scatters back blue-green light. Through summer it hangs there; in autumn the melt slows, and the dust slowly sinks to the bottom, 259 metres down, in a lake about 14 km long.
What you’re seeing: Aerial photographs by swisstopo. Over open water their patchy glints and ripples are smoothed out; the fine grain is real. The cumulus are from a satellite image of another day, placed by hand, and the gulls and dragonflies are drawn.
The valley
A valley dug by a glacier in the ice ages, deeper in the middle than at either end; the lake fills the hollow it scoured.
A river cuts a valley shaped like a V; a glacier, grinding with the rock frozen into its base, widens it into a U with steep walls and a flat floor. When the ice withdrew at the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago, water filled the hollow it had scoured. The mountains around are still about a fifth under ice.
What you’re seeing: Aerial photographs by swisstopo, seen straight down; the mountains show only by their light and shade.
Mountains
Mountains where two plates of the crust collide, still rising. Their peaks hold glaciers, rivers of ice that grind the rock beneath them into dust.
The plates push the range up by about a millimetre a year, and ice, rivers and frost wear it down about as fast. Above some 3,000 metres more snow falls than summer can melt; it packs into ice that flows downhill a few hundred metres a year and scours the valleys deep. The white is that ice and snow; in the ice ages it covered all but the highest peaks.
What you’re seeing: A mosaic of Sentinel-2 photographs from many clear days, seen straight down; the relief shows only by its light and shade. The cumulus are cut from a satellite image of a summer day and placed by hand.
Earth’s surface
Rock and liquid water, seven-tenths of it ocean: the only open water on any world in the Solar System.
The crust is broken into slowly moving plates, seven of them large; no other known planet has plates at all. Where they pull apart, new ocean floor wells up; where they collide, mountains rise, and ice, rivers and wind wear them down again. Ice covers about a tenth of the land.
What you’re seeing: A mosaic of Sentinel-2 photographs from many clear days, so it has no clouds; its colours are brightened on the way down. The cumulus are real, cut from a satellite image of a summer day and placed by hand.
Earth
A planet 12,742 km across. Every distance on this journey is measured from here.
At this scale its air is a thin line along the edge: nine-tenths of it lies within 16 km of the ground, a thousandth of the planet’s width.
What you’re seeing: Earth as it is turned today, from satellite mosaics, a day of NASA cloud maps and city lights on the night side. The aurora is drawn as in a strong storm.
Near-Earth space
Satellites circle Earth, the farthest 36,000 km up, inside a cloud of thin, charged gas that turns with the planet.
The International Space Station orbits 420 km up, once every 90 minutes. GPS satellites fly at about 20,000 km, and at 35,786 km a satellite goes round once as Earth turns once, so it seems to hang over one spot. Of the 16,842 working satellites catalogued on 31 October 2026, 16,064 come within 2,000 km of the ground and about 570 hold that geostationary orbit. Round them lies the plasmasphere: gas from the top of the air, split into ions and electrons and held by Earth’s magnetic field out to about 20,000 km.
What you’re seeing: Orbits to scale. The ISS follows its real altitude and inclination; the other dots are every active satellite in CelesTrak’s catalogue, each on its own orbit from where it was on 31 October 2026, so the geostationary ones hang over their own longitudes. Motion is sped up. The blue glow is the plasmasphere, invisible to the eye and shown in false colour.
Magnetosphere
Earth’s magnetic field holds off the wind of particles from the Sun, and the wind sweeps it into a long tail.
On the day side the solar wind is stopped about 60,000 km out, just behind a bow shock where it slows abruptly; on the night side the field trails for millions of kilometres, far past the Moon. Inside, the Van Allen belts trap fast particles in two rings, found in 1958 by Explorer 1, the first American satellite. Where the wind leaks in near the poles, it lights the aurora.
What you’re seeing: The bow shock and the magnetopause follow a model fitted to spacecraft crossings (Shue et al. 1998). The amber is the Van Allen belts and the violet the gas outside the magnetosphere, shown as an illustration of its X-ray glow: all invisible to the eye, shown in false colour.
Earth & Moon
The Moon circles Earth about 384,000 km away, roughly 30 Earths lined up.
Light crosses the gap in just over a second. The Moon, a quarter of Earth’s width, drifts 3.8 cm farther away each year. In April 2026 the Artemis II crew went 406,771 km from Earth, farther than anyone before.
What you’re seeing: The Moon begins near its calculated position, on an inclined elliptical orbit; motion is sped up.
Earth’s Hill sphere
Out to 1.5 million km, Earth’s pull outweighs the Sun’s. Whatever orbits Earth for long, the Moon included, stays inside.
At two points on its edge, L1 toward the Sun and L2 away from it, the pulls balance, and a spacecraft can circle them on little fuel: SOHO watches the Sun from L1, and the James Webb telescope works at L2, where the Sun, Earth and Moon all stay on one side of its sunshield. Orbits stay stable only about halfway out; the Moon, a quarter of the way, is well inside.
What you’re seeing: The edge is computed from the pulls of Earth and the Sun, not seen: nothing marks it in space. It is drawn as a thin glowing sheet, not a ball but a lobe pinched to a point at L1 and L2.
Sun & inner planets
The Sun holds 99.8% of the Solar System’s mass. Earth orbits it 150 million km away: one astronomical unit (au).
Sunlight takes about 8 minutes to reach Earth. Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are small rocky worlds. Venus, not Mercury, is the hottest of them, its thick carbon dioxide air trapping the heat. Some asteroids cross Earth’s orbit or pass near it: about 940 of these near-Earth asteroids are wider than 1 km, and almost all of them have been found.
What you’re seeing: Planets where they are today, on orbits simplified to circles. The specks among them are the 1,200 largest near-Earth asteroids, down to about 0.9 km, each on its real orbit; the bluish ones are comets, every one with a known orbit, where it is today. The golden glow, sunlight scattered by dust, is exaggerated.
Asteroid belt & Jupiter
Between Mars and Jupiter orbit millions of rocky leftovers that never became a planet. Jupiter outweighs all the other planets together.
All the asteroids together hold only about 3% of the Moon’s mass, spread so thin that spacecraft cross the belt without steering round anything. Jupiter’s gravity clears gaps in the belt and herds two swarms of asteroids, the Trojans, 60 degrees ahead of it and behind it on its orbit. Ceres, the largest asteroid at 939 km across, holds about two fifths of that mass.
What you’re seeing: Each speck is a real asteroid on its own orbit, where it is today: the 5,800 largest in the belt, down to about 11 km, and the 1,840 largest Trojans, down to about 12 km, so the two keep close to their true proportions. The gaps in the belt are at their real distances.
Solar System
Eight planets, then the icy Kuiper Belt. Neptune orbits 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth does.
Sunlight takes four hours to reach Neptune. Beyond it, the Kuiper Belt holds Pluto and other dwarf planets among countless icy bodies. Some follow long, tilted orbits: Eris swings out to almost 100 times Earth’s distance from the Sun. Over 80 km across, the Kuiper Belt holds about 140,000 bodies and the asteroid belt 285.
What you’re seeing: Dwarf planets on their real orbits, planets on circles. The Kuiper Belt is drawn as 10,000 bodies: all 8,305 catalogued ones on their real orbits, and 1,695 over about 200 km that are not yet found, placed from the OSSOS survey’s model.
Heliosphere
The solar wind blows a bubble into the gas between the stars. Its edge, the heliopause, lies about 120 au from the Sun.
The wind leaves the Sun at around 400 km/s, slows abruptly at the termination shock, near 90 au, and stops at the heliopause. Voyager 1 crossed it in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018. Voyager 1 is now about 170 au away; its signal takes almost a day to reach us.
What you’re seeing: The boundaries stand where both Voyagers crossed them; the tail follows a simple model and its shape is still debated.
Sedna
Sedna never comes closer to the Sun than 76 au and swings out to about 900 au. One lap takes 11,000 years.
Nothing in the Solar System today could have pulled it onto such an orbit. A star passing the young Sun may have done it, or an undiscovered planet far out: a handful of bodies on similar orbits, such as Leleākūhonua, have sent astronomers looking for one.
What you’re seeing: Sedna and Leleākūhonua on their real orbits, and the path of comet Catalina, in from 36,000 au and out on an open orbit, with the comet where it is today.
Oort Cloud
A vast shell of icy bodies thought to surround the Sun, reaching perhaps 100,000 au, more than a light-year and a half.
No object has been seen in the Oort Cloud itself; it is inferred from comets that fall toward the Sun from every direction. It may hold a trillion of them, yet spread through so much space that neighbours are typically some 15 au apart, and sunlight takes about a year and a half to reach its outer edge. Voyager 1 would need about 300 years to reach its inner edge and some 30,000 years to pass beyond it.
What you’re seeing: The faint lines are the orbits of 339 comets that fell in from here, as they were before the planets bent them; each comet came from the far end of its line. Each dot stands for some hundred million comets, on an orbit as wide as one of theirs, tilted at random. They circle the Sun far faster than real comets, which take millions of years a lap. The passing comets are drawn vastly too large. The stars are real, at their measured positions.
Solar neighborhood
The nearest stars. Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light-years away, is our closest neighbor.
About 370 stars.
Most of those stars are faint red dwarfs; at most one of them, under the darkest skies, can be seen with the naked eye. Only a few neighbors, such as Sirius (8.6 light-years) and Vega (25), are bright in our sky. Our first radio broadcasts, from the 1920s, have now travelled about 100 light-years.
What you’re seeing: Real stars at their measured positions, seen in perspective from above the Sun, so nearer stars spread wider. Dot size shows brightness. Many faint red dwarfs are missing. The pale clouds are the Local Interstellar Cloud round the Sun and its neighbours, their outlines drawn.
Local Bubble
The Sun sits in a cavity about 1,000 light-years across, blown out by supernovae over the last 14 million years.
About a million stars.
The explosions swept gas and dust into a shell, and where the shell is densest new stars form: every star-forming cloud within about 500 light-years lies on its surface. The Pleiades, 440 light-years away, are one of the young clusters nearby.
What you’re seeing: The star-forming clouds and the dark Coalsack and Aquila Rift are at their measured places; the wall between them is drawn. The hot gas inside glows only in X-rays, shown in false-colour violet. Beyond the wall the brown clouds are dust mapped in 3D from the reddening of Gaia stars; the pink glows are the brightest clouds of hydrogen lit by young stars in it, shaped by a map of the sky in hydrogen-alpha light. The fine field of stars farther out is seeded, not catalogued.
Orion Arm
The Sun lies in the Orion Arm, a short spur between two of the Milky Way’s great spiral arms, lit by hot young stars and glowing gas.
About 100 million stars.
Spiral arms are not fixed: stars and gas drift through them, and the arms themselves may fade and form anew. The brightest stars burn out before they drift far from where they were born, so they light the arms up. The Orion Nebula, 1,300 light-years away, is making stars right now.
What you’re seeing: Real hot young stars and Cepheids from Gaia-based catalogs, over a fine field of stars seeded from the galaxy image. The dust lanes near the Sun are measured; the pink knots of glowing gas are placed along the arms, not mapped. The Carina Nebula is a photograph, drawn at twice its size; the Gum Nebula and Barnard’s Loop round Orion are from an all-sky hydrogen map.
Milky Way
Our galaxy: a disk of stars about 100,000 light-years across.
100 to 400 billion stars.
The Sun lies about 26,600 light-years from the center and takes around 230 million years to go round it once. At the center sits Sagittarius A*, a black hole 4 million times the mass of the Sun.
What you’re seeing: An artist’s impression informed by Gaia data (ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar): no one has seen our galaxy from outside.
Magellanic Clouds
Two small galaxies 160,000 and 200,000 light-years away, falling toward the Milky Way, probably for the first time. Both shine in the southern night sky.
About 60 satellite galaxies.
Their pull on each other has torn gas out of them: a stream of hydrogen trails behind the Clouds across more than half the sky. Closer in, the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy is being pulled apart, its stars strewn round the Milky Way in long streams.
What you’re seeing: The galaxies at their measured distances. The gas stream, seen only by radio telescopes, is traced along its measured path. The gold circle around the Milky Way is the edge of its dark matter halo, known only by its pull.
Local Group
The Milky Way, Andromeda and more than 80 smaller galaxies, held together by gravity. Andromeda lies 2.5 million light-years away.
Nearly all of its stars belong to Andromeda and the Milky Way; almost every other member is a small dwarf galaxy. The two giants are approaching each other at about 110 km/s and may merge in several billion years.
What you’re seeing: Real galaxies at their measured distances. Faint dwarf galaxies are still being discovered.
Nearby galaxy groups
The Local Group is one of several small groups strung along a flat sheet of galaxies.
Over 1,000 galaxies.
In the M81 Group, 12 million light-years away, M81 and M82 are still pulling at each other. Centaurus A, at the heart of its group, is a giant elliptical galaxy that swallowed a spiral and now shoots jets far out into space.
What you’re seeing: Real galaxies at their measured distances. Faint dwarfs are still being found.
Local Supercluster
Galaxies gather around the Virgo Cluster, about 54 million light-years away. The Local Group sits on the outskirts.
About 50,000 galaxies.
The Virgo Cluster alone holds more than a thousand galaxies. Its gravity tugs on the Local Group: we still move away from it as the universe expands, but more slowly than we otherwise would.
What you’re seeing: Real galaxies, placed by their redshift and flattened onto one plane. A strip hidden behind the Milky Way’s disk is missing.
Laniakea
The supercluster that holds the Milky Way, about 500 million light-years across. All its galaxies drift toward one region, the Great Attractor.
About 100,000 large galaxies.
Laniakea means “immeasurable heaven” in Hawaiian. It was mapped in 2014 not by where galaxies are but by where they move: its edge is where the flow turns toward another basin. The Great Attractor lies behind the Milky Way’s disk, which long hid it from view.
What you’re seeing: Real galaxies from the 2MASS Redshift Survey, placed by their redshift, over a simulation fitted to the surveyed galaxies, so its filaments and clusters stand where the real ones do. The named clusters stand at their measured places.
Cosmic web
On the largest scales, galaxies gather into filaments and clusters around vast, nearly empty voids.
About a million large galaxies.
Voids can span hundreds of millions of light-years. The web grew from tiny ripples in the early universe, pulled together over billions of years by gravity, mostly that of dark matter.
What you’re seeing: A computer simulation, not a map. Near us it is fitted to the surveyed galaxies, so the big structures are where the real ones are; farther out it shows what the universe looks like on these scales, not where real galaxies are.
Observable universe
Everything whose light has had time to reach us: a sphere about 93 billion light-years across, centered on us.
Hundreds of billions of galaxies.
Looking farther means looking back in time, all the way to the cosmic microwave background, light released 380,000 years after the Big Bang. That light has travelled for 13.8 billion years, yet the sphere is 93 billion light-years across: space kept stretching while the light was on its way.
What you’re seeing: An illustration built from a simulation, fading toward the edge, where we see earlier times. The rim is the microwave background as Planck measured it.
Beyond our horizon
Our view stops at the horizon, but space goes on. Every place has its own observable universe.
Measurements find space flat within their precision, so the universe may be infinite. If it is finite, it is at least about as large as the part we can see, and it has no edge: like the surface of a globe, it would close on itself.
What you’re seeing: Illustration. The spheres are other places’ observable universes, each as large as ours; their light has not reached us.
Without end
If space has no end, past every horizon lie more horizons, without limit.
Perhaps infinitely many galaxies.
An infinite universe would hold infinitely many stars and planets. If matter is spread the same way everywhere, any arrangement of it that can happen must happen again somewhere, this page and its reader included. Max Tegmark estimated that the nearest copy of you would be about 10 to the power of 10²⁹ metres away: a number with more digits than there are stars we can see. No observation could ever reach far enough to check.
What you’re seeing: Other horizons, until they are too small to see; the glow at the edges is imagined, not observed. At this scale our whole observable universe is a speck a few pixels wide.