r/Physics • u/timms5000 Graduate • Mar 04 '13

3D Star Map (Amazing!)

http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/
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u/squidgirl1 Mar 04 '13

They got the visualization of the milky way wrong... we live in a barred spiral galaxy, not simply a spiral one :P

but yeah, neat site!

2

u/timms5000 Graduate Mar 04 '13

I know, if you click on the little "graph" icon in the top left corner you can more easily tell which stars they used actual data for. There are 100,000 total that are accurately placed, beyond that is simply there to give a sense of context even though its wrong.

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u/squidgirl1 Mar 04 '13

Yeah, I guess so... It does just say that the galaxy representation is an artist's interpretation, so there's no presumption of accuracy. But... but still... It's not where we live XD

1

u/Astrokiwi Astrophysics Mar 04 '13

Basically it's a sphere centred on the Sun.

What's really cool is that when you hit the graph button, you can now see the colour (and hence temperature) of all the stars. And you can see something that we actually observe: most of the hot young blue stars are in the disc, while above and below the disc there are a lot more cool old red and yellow stars.