A little further.
A scroll through our universe
01 / Earth
Everything starts here.
Every place you have been. Everyone you have known. One small world, wrapped in a thin blue atmosphere.
Sunlight takes about 8 minutes to reach us.
Source: NASA ↗An AIrcade experiment by Artem Frolov
Big universe. Keep exploring.
A light-year is the distance light travels in one year: about 9.46 trillion kilometres. This journey compresses immense distances into a few scrolls. The illustrations are conceptual, not a map or a scale model.
Read the journey & sources
Earth
Every place you have been. Everyone you have known. One small world, wrapped in a thin blue atmosphere. 12,742 km · mean diameter. Sunlight takes about 8 minutes to reach us. NASA source ↗
Earth & Moon
Pull back and the Moon comes into view. That familiar light in our night sky is much further away than it feels. 384,400 km · average distance from Earth. About 30 Earths could fit across the distance between their centres. NASA source ↗
Solar System
Earth becomes a point in a family of planets. Beyond Neptune, icy worlds lead out towards the distant Oort Cloud. 4.5 billion km · Sun to Neptune, approximately. One astronomical unit is about 150 million km: the Earth–Sun distance. NASA source ↗
Milky Way
Our solar system lives in a spiral galaxy. Vast lanes of stars and dust curl around its bright central region. 100,000 light-years · approximate disk diameter. Our solar system takes about 230 million years to orbit the galaxy. NASA source ↗
Local Group
The Milky Way, Andromeda and dozens of smaller galaxies form our Local Group, held together by gravity. 2.5 million light-years · distance to Andromeda. The light we see from Andromeda began its journey before modern humans existed. NASA source ↗
Cosmic Web
Zoom out again. Galaxies gather in threads and walls around enormous cosmic voids. Like bubbles, traced in galaxies. 92 billion light-years · observable universe diameter, approximately. This view is a small, imagined patch of the cosmic web. The size of the whole universe is unknown. NASA source ↗