The Known Universe
Credit & Copyright:
American Museum of Natural History
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.