Milky way galaxy map 3d google. Travel across the galaxy made possible

If you look at the sky on a clear starry night, the first thing that will attract your attention will most likely be a wide whitish stripe, like a road, stretching across the entire sky. This is the Milky Way, mysterious, intriguing, exciting the imagination. After all, it consists of many billions of stars scattered in outer space for many thousands of light years. And among all this multitude there is one star, the dearest to us - our Sun.

What is the Milky Way?

Milky Way- This galaxy, which includes the Solar System. It can be seen from any point on the Earth's surface. It forms a ring encircling the Earth. In the Northern Hemisphere, it passes through the constellation Cassiopeia, a little east of Orion's Belt, approaching the horizon not far from the brightest star, Sirius. Residents of the brightest parts of the Milky Way Northern Hemisphere they can’t admire. They are available to those who live closer to the equator. The bright, uniform glow of many stars, indistinguishable to the eye, is interspersed with dark “clouds” of cosmic dust.

origin of name

The ancient Chinese called the Milky Way the “Heavenly River”, and the Romans and Greeks called it the “Heavenly Road”. Modern name comes from the Latin “via lacteal”, which translates as “milk road”. This name goes back to ancient Greek mythology. According to one of the myths, the son of Zeus Hercules was born from a mortal woman. Zeus placed the baby on his wife Hera while she was sleeping so that he would drink her divine milk and gain immortality. Waking up and seeing that she was feeding someone else’s child, the goddess pushed him away from her. A stream of milk sprayed from her breast and froze in the sky, turning into the Milky Way. The word “Galaxy,” by the way, has the same meaning: it is derived from the Greek word γαλακτικός, which is translated as “milk.”

History of the discovery and study of the Milky Way

Galileo Galilei proved that the Milky Way is a huge collection of stars that are invisible to the naked eye. In 1610 he invented and manufactured a telescope. When he pointed it at the Milky Way, he was amazed: instead of a whitish haze, countless sparkling stars appeared to his gaze. Now they could be considered separately.

In the 18th century, the English scientist William Herschel, counting the number of stars in different parts sky, discovered a large circle, later called the galactic equator. It was in this circle that the Milky Way was located. Thus, Herschel came to the conclusion that the stars are united in a colossal system, flattened towards the galactic equator.

The Milky Way is not the only galaxy, it is one of many galaxies that make up our Universe. This was proven by Edwin Hubble in the 20s of the 20th century.

Having managed to measure the distance to some nebulae, Hubble proved that they cannot enter our Galaxy based on their distance.

Structure of the Milky Way

Milky Way refers to the species spiral galaxies with jumper. Its diameter is 100-120 thousand light years (in kilometers this is one quintillion). It is a relatively flat disk (its thickness is about a thousand light years). The Galaxy contains at least 200 billion stars. According to modern estimates, their number is close to 400 billion. The densest cluster of stars is observed closer to the center of the Milky Way, and towards its edges the density drops sharply.

Center milky way

At the center of the Milky Way's disk is the galactic core, consisting of many billions of old stars. And the center of the core, in turn, only a few light years in size, is an unusually massive region (its mass is several million Suns). Modern research show that there is a black hole, and maybe several.

Around the galactic disk there is a kind of corona - a spherical halo. It consists of globular star clusters, dwarf galaxies (Small and Large Magellanic clouds and others), individual stars, as well as hot gas.
In the plane of the galactic disk, spiral arms (Orion, Perseus, Sagittarius, Cygnus, Centauri) stretch from its center to the edges.

On the outskirts of the Milky Way there are, in addition to stars, regions of gas of high density and sizes of several thousand light years.

Our Sun is located at a distance of 28 thousand light years from the center (two-thirds of the radius), on the periphery of the Milky Way. The plane of the Solar System does not coincide with the plane of the Galaxy; they lie at an angle to each other.

Interactive maps of the Milky Way online.

Several services today provide the opportunity to view in detail many images of the Milky Way. The best of them are presented below:

Map of the Milky Way 3D. This card high resolution with several functions, which consists of 5,000 megapixel photos. It allows you to change the image scale and angle. In addition, it includes an additional layer with which you can familiarize yourself with the star map (see constellations and their names). The map can be rotated with the mouse in any direction directly on the screen. To go to the map, click on the image:

Map 1

The second map is an infrared image of the Milky Way. More than 800,000 Spitzer telescope frames were stitched together to produce such an accurate and beautiful image. To go to the map, click on the image:

Map 2

The following map is unique in that it provides the opportunity to see a wide variety of images of the Milky Way. You can choose the image type in the lower left window from the many options presented. To go to the map, click on the image:

Map 3

What is the future of our Galaxy? Are collisions with other galaxies possible? While scientists cannot give accurate forecasts. Studying and resolving these issues is still ahead.

And finally, a very beautiful shot of the Milky Way from the highest point in Spain:

Artistic photo milky way

Screenshot from the application

Want to Milky Way watch online? Google's new visualization service, 100,000 Stars, lets you tour our cosmic environs, either independently or via an interactive tour.

Also available detailed information about the luminaries closest to us. Knowledge of English is necessary, but even if you don’t know it, you can listen to relaxing music and watch beautiful space animation.

Travel across the galaxy made possible

But recently, thanks to interactive visualization of our Galaxy, everyone has the opportunity to travel through the expanses of the Milky Way. Now you just need to open the “Our Galaxy 3D and 100,000 Stars” service in your browser and immerse yourself in a virtual journey in space. Developed by Google, the app includes location data for nearly 120,000 Milky Way stars, collected from a variety of sources, including space missions.

Navigation

Move around interactive map done by panning using a mouse or touchpad.

Clicking on the star of interest will display information about it. In this case, the camera approaches directly the selected star, and the entire star is displayed in the window next to it. necessary information. This makes it possible to study the objects of our Galaxy in detail.

Music

The journey through the interactive space is accompanied by musical works by composer Sam Hulink, who is also known for writing music for computer games, such as Mass Effect.

> Collision of galaxies. Computer 3D model

Consider quality 3D model of galaxy collision: Consequence modeling, online merger process, central black hole collision.

Who knows how many unsolved secrets and mysteries the unknown and boundless space conceals? People are not destined to fully unravel them; even knowledge about their native Solar System is quite limited; it is just a speck of dust floating surrounded by endless star clusters. For many thousands of years, humanity has been striving to learn all the secrets of the Universe, it has even managed to comprehend some truths, but this knowledge is too limited and superficial.

Numerous slowly float in cold space, sometimes they occur collisions, the scale of which is difficult to even imagine to an ordinary person. These are, without exaggeration, phenomena of universal magnitude and significance, hardly comparable in their entertainment to anything in this world.

Consequences of a galactic collision

When two galaxies collide, the release of energy that accompanies this process cannot be comprehended by the human mind. As a result, two giants, merged into one, begin to glow with double power. This event is extremely long-term from a human point of view and can last several billion years - naturally, for this reason, scientists are deprived of the opportunity to observe the entire merger process from the very beginning to its completion. Fortunately, modern Computer techologies allow you to simulate the moment galaxy collisions, shortening it hundreds of thousands of times.

Model of galaxy collision on a computer monitor

Attention! Use your mouse pointer to change the angle.

Everyone now has the opportunity to admire the interactive process of galaxy collisions in 3D resolution. A new application allows you to observe the attraction of two galactic nuclei, which are, as a result of which a mesmerizing cosmic dance begins. Some amount star systems leaves the newly formed galaxy and continues its endless path in the Universe - the program shows them in the form of colored dots.

Animated image of a galaxy collision

Controlling a galactic collision simulation program

All navigation of the program, simulating the collision of galaxies, is carried out using the mouse - you can change the angle by moving it in the program window, the scale is changed by simply moving the wheel. To reset the simulation and start the process again, click the mouse button.

This application allows you to plunge deeper into the mysteries of the universe and even imagine possible global consequences collisions of two giants - and the Milky Way.

Yesterday, April 25, 2018, the European Space Agency posted open access second release of a dataset collected by the Gaia space telescope. This special apparatus, which is designed for overview monitoring of all 360 o celestial sphere in the optical range.

Assembling the Gaia telescope

It uses a wide-angle lens (which is, of course, a simplified description; in reality there are several lenses at different angles and focuses), and unlike, say, the Hubble telescope, which aims at a very narrow area of the sky to clearly observe a specific star or galaxy, this one takes pictures of several million stars at once. And he has been doing this continuously for five years now. Moreover, what is most important, it does not orbit the Earth like the Hubble telescope, but is located at the L2 Lagrange point. A very populated place today, this is where the most powerful James Webb space telescope will go, which will replace Hubble in 2019. Rotating with the Earth around the Sun, Gaia takes pictures of the same patch of sky from different points in its orbit about 70 times and eventually gets a picture of the parallax of each specific star.

The result is something like this scheme, although the video is, of course, a simulation, and even exaggerated in effects for clarity. In reality, the displacement of stars is absolutely minuscule; very good optics and computer processing are needed. Therefore, only space telescopes can construct these maps, atmospheric inhomogeneities completely nullify all the efforts of any terrestrial telescopes, and the parallax method from the Earth can measure the distance only to the nearest 10,000 stars or so.

But when observing from space, where nothing interferes, you can very accurately calculate the position of the star not only in the sky, in the plane, but also in 3D, that is, build a good three-dimensional map of our part of the galaxy. In 2016, Gaia made its first test release, which contained the coordinates of two million nearby stars, and now it has posted an archive containing data on 1.7 billion stars in our galaxy.

New refined image of our Milky Way galaxy

It's great that the data is publicly available. Available for all humanity, for any specific person. I wouldn’t be surprised that beautiful 3D videos or even interactive 3D maps will appear in the near future; the previous simulation was based on the position of just something.

In general, this is a very correct and necessary undertaking - to publish scientific data in general access. Not those beautiful pictures that are published for general public, and which are only suitable for putting on a desktop, but a real array of scientific data. So that anyone with access to the Internet can at least check what these scoundrel scientists are up to, and even put forward some kind of theory themselves, or even commit scientific discovery based on data processing using our own numerical methods. Which, by the way, happens periodically.

It’s great that we are slowly refining the map of the Milky Way galaxy; I remind you that 1.7 billion stars is a tiny part of it, less than 2%. In total, according to various estimates, in our galaxy there are from 100 to 400 billion stars. And in the observable Universe there are no less the same or approximately similar galaxies.

By the way, cartography is not a cheap pleasure these days. The Gaia mission will cost approximately $1 billion and is scheduled to last until at least 2020. In addition to the position of the stars of our galaxy, Gaia will also help to obtain more accurate map nearby galaxies, and has already compiled an updated catalog (about 14,000) of asteroids of our Solar System. The Gaia space telescope was launched from the Kourou cosmodrome using a Soyuz launch vehicle and accelerating block"Frigate" in 2013.

P.S. By the way, experts should note that the above picture of the galaxy is located “upside down”. Whichever one I found with a quick Google, I inserted that into the post. The two white spots on the top and left are the satellite galaxies of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, they are usually located below, under the disk of the galaxy, but go figure out where in space it is “above” and where “below”. It is now accepted by scientists that what points where North Pole Earth, there is the north pole (that is, the top) of the ecliptic plane of the Solar System. There is the “top” of the Milky Way galaxy, but it’s all at tricky angles, and in general conventions, so...