Atlasoftheuniverse.com Website Review

This web page is designed to give everyone an idea of what our universe actually looks like. There are nine main maps on this web page, each one approximately ten times the scale of the previous one. The first map shows the nearest stars and then the other maps slowly expand out until we have reached the scale of the entire visible universe. The Nearest Stars The closest star to the Sun is only 7000 times further than the edge of our solar system. This map shows all of the The Solar Neighbourhood A large proportion of the stars visible with the na*ed eye are within 250 light years. This map shows this tiny The Orion Arm The local arm of our galaxy is called the Orion Arm. It is depicted here showing the millions of stars interspersed with The Milky Way Galaxy Our galaxy is a loose spiral disc of two hundred billion stars rotating around a compact centre. This is a diagram The Satellite Galaxies The Milky Way is surrounded by several dwarf galaxies slowly orbiting it in periods of billions of years. This map The Local Group The Milky Way is gravitationally bound to two other large spiral galaxies as well as dozens of dwarf galaxies. This local The Virgo Supercluster The local group of galaxies is just one of many centred around the mas*ive Virgo Cluster. Collectively, all of these groups and clusters form a unit known as the Virgo Supercluster shown here. The Neighbouring Superclusters The distribution of galaxies in the universe is far from regular. They tend to clump together into huge supercluster formations. This map shows many of the superclusters within 1 billion light years of us. The Visible Universe Although our knowledge of the large scale structure of the universe is incomplete, many large and small scale features are visible right out to the very edge of the visible universe. The entire universe is fairly uniform, as this map shows. This is a glossary which should hopefully explain most of the unexplained terms used in this web page. This is my attempt at a list of other web pages which have maps and other useful data on various aspects of the universe.