Know the Universe — fly through the cosmic web, 43,497 real galaxies in 3D
This is an interactive 3D map of 43,497 real galaxies — it needs JavaScript to fly.
Cosmic Web · local universe
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Welcome to the local universe<br>Every point of light here is a real galaxy — 43,497 of them, mapped by<br>real telescopes. Gravity has woven them into the cosmic web :<br>filaments, clusters and voids. You're inside it.
🪐 orbit drag tumbles the web around our galaxy ·<br>scroll zooms · double-click levelsdrag to tumble ·<br>pinch to zoom · double-tap to level<br>➤ fly WASD + mouse · Q/E down·up ·<br>Shift boost · Esc frees the mousehold<br>● to fly, slide it to steer · one finger looks around
Switch modes anytime with O or the 🪐 button.
1–6 presets — different ways of seeing the matter
M settings · N the story · ? this card<br>Switch modes with the 🪐 button ·<br>⚙ settings & presets · ⓘ the full story
➤ fly<br>🪐 orbit
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ABOUT N / Esc
“The Cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.<br>We are a way for the universe to know itself.”<br>— Carl Sagan
THE DATA
Every point of light here is a real galaxy — typically a hundred<br>billion stars — from the 2MASS Redshift Survey (Huchra et al.<br>2012): 43,497 galaxies covering the whole sky. A galaxy's direction comes<br>from where we see it, good to arcseconds; its distance from its<br>redshift — how much the expansion of the universe has stretched<br>its light on the way to us. The map reaches out roughly 300 megaparsecs,<br>about one billion light-years in every direction from the<br>octahedron marking the Milky Way.
Every galaxy sits at its real-space position, the most accurate<br>we can place it: the redshift is corrected to the cosmic microwave<br>background frame and turned into a comoving distance for a standard flat<br>universe, cluster members are gathered to their group so the redshift<br>"Fingers of God" no longer smear them toward us (Tully 2015 groups), and<br>the large-scale infall toward the great attractors is subtracted using<br>the 2M++ flow model (Carrick 2015), which recovers Virgo and Coma to<br>their measured distances. What's left is a genuine 3D map, not a<br>redshift-space shadow of one.
WHAT YOU ARE SEEING
Matter at this scale is not scattered at random. Gravity has spent 13.8<br>billion years gathering it into the cosmic web: glowing filaments<br>that meet at dense knots — galaxy clusters like Virgo, Coma and Perseus —<br>wrapped around vast, almost empty voids. The banner at the top<br>tells you which of these you are flying through right now. The dark wedge<br>where no points appear is the Zone of Avoidance: our own galaxy's<br>dust hiding the universe behind it.
AND YET
The light that drew this map ended journeys of up to a billion years<br>inside two telescopes on mountains in Arizona and Chile. The atoms reading<br>this sentence were forged inside stars that died before the Sun was born.<br>You are not looking at the universe from outside — you are one of its<br>dots, inside the largest structure ever mapped, contemplated by a mind<br>the structure itself produced. Press W.
Data: 2MASS Redshift Survey · Huchra et al. 2012
Created by benfiart