Journey through the universe

Travel outward from Earth past the planets, the stars and the Milky Way to the cosmic web and the edge of the observable universe, drawn from real star and…

1. Earth

   Our home planet, 12,742 km across. Every distance on this journey is measured from here.

2. Earth & Moon

   The Moon circles Earth about 384,000 km away, roughly 30 Earths lined up.

3. 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).

4. Solar System

   Eight planets, then the icy Kuiper Belt. Neptune orbits 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth does.

5. 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.

6. Solar neighborhood

   The nearest stars. Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light-years away, is our closest neighbor.

7. Spiral arms

   Young, hot stars trace the Milky Way’s spiral arms. The Sun lies in a minor one, the Orion Arm.

8. Milky Way

   Our galaxy: 100 to 400 billion stars in a disk about 100,000 light-years across.

9. Local Group

   More than 80 galaxies held together by gravity. The largest, Andromeda, lies 2.5 million light-years away.

10. Local Supercluster

    Thousands of galaxies gather around the Virgo Cluster, about 54 million light-years away. The Local Group sits on the outskirts.

11. Cosmic web

    On the largest scales, galaxies gather into filaments and clusters around vast, nearly empty voids.

12. Observable universe

    Everything whose light has had time to reach us: a sphere about 93 billion light-years across, centered on us.

13. Beyond our horizon

    Space does not end at our horizon; only our view does. Every place has its own observable universe.