Home › Tours › Journey to the edge of the universe
Guided tour · 12 stops
🌠 Journey to the edge of the universe
From Earth to the oldest light – through all the levels of the cosmos in 12 stops.
- Home
Our journey begins at home, on Earth. Everything we know is here. Light takes only a little over a second to reach the Moon, and a little over eight minutes to reach the Sun. Remember this feeling of size – in a moment everything will get smaller and smaller.
- The most distant human-made object
Voyager 1 is the most distant thing humans have ever built. After almost fifty years of flight it will soon be a whole light-day away from us. That is a long way – and yet it is only the very first step of our journey.
- The nearest star
We are leaving the Solar System. From here it is just a point of light. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is a little over four light-years away. Voyager would need around 75,000 years to get there.
- Our galaxy
All the stars you see at night belong to the Milky Way – a gigantic spiral of several hundred billion stars. The Sun is one of them, somewhere in a side arm. It takes 230 million years to travel once around the centre.
- The heart of the Milky Way
At the centre of the Milky Way sits a black hole as heavy as four million Suns. Its light takes 26,000 years to reach us.
- The neighbouring galaxy
The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away. The light you see from it today set off when there were not yet any humans like us. And it is coming closer: in a few billion years the two may merge into one single large galaxy.
- The cosmic web
Now our whole group of galaxies shrinks to a tiny dot. Galaxies hang like dewdrops on a gigantic spider's web. The Virgo Cluster, with more than a thousand galaxies, is the centre of our region – its gravity pulls on us too.
- A Swiss astronomer finds the invisible
In the Coma Cluster, the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky discovered something strange in 1933: the galaxies are whizzing around far too fast. There must be much more mass than we can see. He called it dark matter – to this day nobody knows what it is made of.
- The observable universe
This is everything we can see at all: a sphere around 93 billion light-years across. Because light needs time to travel, every look into the distance is a look into the past. Each ring shows a different time.
- The universe as a child
The light from this galaxy travelled for 13.5 billion years. We see it as it was when the universe was only just under 300 million years old. It was discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope.
- The oldest light
Right at the edge glows the oldest light, from 380,000 years after the Big Bang. That was when the universe became transparent. No telescope can look back any further. This is the edge of our view – not the edge of the universe.
- And us?
Somewhere in this tiny dot in the middle is where we are – on a small blue planet. We are unimaginably small. And yet we are the part of the universe that can marvel at it. This is the end of our journey!
In the 3D model the camera flies from stop to stop. The narrator’s voice is computer-generated.
This site is free and has no banner ads. Here is how you can support it