What a beautiful simulated rendition of our place in the universe, by answering the hypothetical question: ‘how would you find your way back home if you were stranded 1 billion light-years from Earth?’ By the way, note the ‘every dot is a galaxy’ and ‘every dot is a star’ notations as the video zooms in. Also, if you’re curious about the Sun’s description as a ‘yellow dwarf’, yes, that’s the nomenclature, although it’s a misnomer, and, as the video says towards the end, our Sun is perfectly unremarkable and ordinary.

To me, videos like these are a reminder of how minuscule we are in the context of how big space is. For all our progress and technology, the farthest our probes have ventured is juuust outside of the solar system.

See also: Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan.

∞

I know this can be hard to picture in your head, but the beauty of it is that once you do, this map sings. You can instantly see what’s what: the motion of the gas, where it’s more dense than other locations, how it’s distributed. It also shows our location in the galaxy! All those changing velocities depend on the Sun’s velocity, the velocity of the gas, but also the direction of the Sun’s motion and its position in the Milky Way’s disk. That’s a stunning amount of information.

This is fascinating.

∞

A composite image created by combining data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Hubble Space telescope, this is a stunning image of two galaxies colliding. Both of them are spiral galaxies, and they are on the verge of a collision—with their disks oriented at 90 degrees to each other!

Well, “on the verge” is in galactic time scales, which means they’ll collide in a few million years. And considering that this is 450 million lightyears away from us, the event has already occurred—we just haven’t seen it yet.

A detailed description of the image is present as a caption with the photo itself. Go see it!

∞