The stars

Check out Google’s new 100,000 Stars project that visualizes our nearby neighbors – the 200 billion or so stars that make up our neighborhood, the Milky Way.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2012

Explore the stellar neighborhood with your browser
Visualizing the exact location of every star in the galaxy is a problem of, well, galactic proportions. With over 200 billion stars, capturing every detail of the Milky Way currently defies scientists and laptops alike. However, using imagery and data from a range of sources, including NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), we were recently able to take one small step in that direction by plotting the location of the stars closest to our sun.

The result is a new Chrome Experiment called 100,000 Stars that visualizes the stellar neighborhood. Using your mouse or trackpad, you can zoom in and out to explore our galaxy. Zooming in reveals the names of the most prominent stars close to our sun – click each name to learn more about it and see a digital rendition.