The Known Universe

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.

Copyright owned by the American Museum of Natural History

Category:

Education

Tags:

• computer
• animation
• earth
• satelites
• solar
• system
• milky
• way
• starts
• known
• universe
• american
• museum
• natural
• history

[Scood]

We won't be seeing the universe how it is now. If we examine a part of the universe, in which it takes 13.7 billion years for light to travel there, we are actually seeing what the universe looked like 13.7 billion years ago... Another example would be, if the sun's image was to change in any way shape or form, we wouldn't' actually notice it until 8 minutes after it had happened.

[LukeNikolau]

Honestly, I don't even understand how the hell we could possibly see something that's so far away that it takes light 13.7 billion years to travel to...

[TitanFrog44]

This video wins.