The Known Universe
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January 20, 2010
Somewhere in the sky tonight, a star is being born in a cloud of gas and dust, beginning a journey that will last billions of years.
The Known Universe
Birthday · January 20, 2010
A little universe, just for you
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APOD published January 20, 2010. Credit: American Museum of Natural History. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What would it look like to travel across the known universe? To help humanity visualize this, the American Museum of Natural History has produced a modern movie featuring many visual highlights of such a trip. The video starts in Earth's Himalayan Mountains and then dramatically zooms out, showing the orbits of Earth's satellites, the Sun, the Solar System, the extent of humanities first radio signals, the Milky Way Galaxy, galaxies nearby, distant galaxies, and quasars. As the distant surface of the microwave background is finally reached, radiation is depicted that was emitted billions of light years away and less than one million years after the Big Bang. Frequently using the Digital Universe Atlas, every object in the video has been rendered to scale given the best scientific research in 2009, when the video was produced. The film has similarities to the famous Powers of Ten video that has been a favorite of many space enthusiasts for a generation.
Image credit: American Museum of Natural History