Zooming Out From Earth to the Edge of the Universe

[00:00:06]Welcome back.

[00:00:08]I wanted to make a video highlighting the closest stars to Earth. Not only that, but basically just all the real stars and galaxies we've discovered. So, every star, nebula, and galaxy you see in this video is real. We have mapped them out, we have given them a name, they are in our database.

[00:00:25]Visualizing the stars that surround us will help us understand where we are.

[00:00:29]Not us on Earth, but our solar system, and how our location in space is not special.

[00:00:35]We will keep zooming out, and eventually we will begin to see the stars around our solar system. Then, once we zoom out enough, we will begin to see other real galaxies that surround us.

[00:00:47]Here we see our moon. At the time of this video being made, Artemis 2 recently finished their journey to the far side of the moon, and now they hold the record for the farthest any human being has traveled from Earth.

[00:00:59]At their farthest point, they were 406,771 km away.

[00:01:06]And they took some amazing photos on this flight, but the ones that scare me the most are these ones that show parts of the window they are looking out of.

[00:01:14]It makes the planets feel so much more ominous.

[00:01:18]But, let's get back to our simulation.

[00:01:20]Let's turn on the orbits of the planets, so we can see the structure of our solar system.

[00:01:25]>> [music] >> Here's something interesting about the orbits of planets. Kepler, who was a 17th century astronomer, discovered that the planets orbit the sun in ellipses rather than perfect circles. But, he hated that conclusion. At the time, circles were seen as almost perfect shapes, and Kepler believed that the heavens were a realm of perfection. So, planetary orbits should be in circles.

[00:01:50]For years, he tried to force the planets' motions into circular orbits, but his observations refused to fit. So, eventually he had to accept what the evidence was telling him. Planetary orbits are elliptical.

[00:02:13]>> [music] >> Now, we can see our solar system and just how massive it is.

[00:02:21]But, the strange thing is almost none of what we're looking at is actually made of planets.

[00:02:26]The Sun contains about 99.8% of all the mass in our solar system.

[00:02:31]And of the tiny fraction left over, Jupiter contains more than twice as much material as all the other planets combined.

[00:02:45]>> [music] [music] >> We are getting to the point where we can almost see our neighboring solar systems.

[00:02:58]Now, it's hard to realize how much space is in between stars, but here's a fun fact. The space between neighboring star systems is so vast that you could line up roughly 2.2 [music] billion Earths in between them.

[00:03:15]>> [music] >> There is the Alpha Centauri system, which consists of three different stars.

[00:03:28]Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B, and Proxima Centauri, which is the closest star to Earth.

[00:03:34]In my previous video, I discussed [music] if it was possible for humanity to fly to Proxima Centauri. If you want to know the answer to that question, watch this video.

[00:03:44]>> [music] >> Right here is the star Sirius, and it's the brightest star in our sky. It's a binary star system, meaning it's actually two stars orbiting each other.

[00:03:54]Over here is the star Epsilon Indi. It's about 75% the mass of our sun and has two brown dwarfs and one super-Jupiter planet orbiting around it. And right over here, next to Sirius, is the star >> [music] >> Procyon. Again, it's actually two stars orbiting each other and there's no confirmed exoplanets around them.

[00:04:14]>> [music] >> From out here, our solar system is barely visible. Just a tiny point of light and yet everything we know happened there. Every person who has ever lived, every friendship, every argument, our entire history as a species happened on that tiny speck.

[00:04:36]From this distance, we look so insignificant, but to us, it is the place where everything we know has happened.

[00:04:43]Think about [music] all the possibilities that could exist beyond our solar system.

[00:04:52]>> [music] [music] [music] >> I want you to remember that everything you're looking at is real. All the stars you are seeing have been observed and mapped. It's remarkable if you really think about it. Knowledge has been passed down for thousands [music] of years, allowing us to understand ideas that once would have seemed impossible.

[00:05:22]>> [music] [music] >> And here's something else to keep in mind. SpaceEngine, which is what's running these visuals you are seeing right now, has cataloged 130,000 real stars.

[00:05:42]But in reality, we have mapped out much [music] more than we are seeing. 1.7 billion stars. That's how many we have measured the position and distance of.

[00:05:52]This dwarfs the 130,000 stars we are currently looking at. And the 1.7 billion stars we have mapped, that is less than 1% of the total amount of stars in our galaxy.

[00:06:04]In reality, the space that we are traveling through isn't empty. This is just an uncataloged area of space. The real amount of stars in this area looks more like this.

[00:06:14]>> [music] >> Now we can begin to see the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

[00:06:30]We are located on the Orion arm, which is right here.

[00:06:34]Our entire solar system is orbiting the Milky Way at roughly 829,000 km/h.

[00:06:40]One complete orbit, sometimes called a galactic year, takes about 230 million years.

[00:06:46]So the last time our solar system was at this part of the galaxy, which we're at right now, dinosaurs walked the Earth.

[00:06:54]And here at the center of our galaxy is the core, packed densely with hundreds of millions of stars. And at the very center of it all is a super massive black hole, Sagittarius A star.

[00:07:09]So as we continue zooming out, we will begin to see the galaxies around us. And again, these will all be real galaxies.

[00:07:19]At the bottom left corner of your screen, you can see our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. This is a galaxy 2.5 million light-years away from us. It's the farthest object that is visible with the naked eye in our night sky.

[00:07:31]So if you ever see this faint smudge in the sky, know that it's an entirely separate galaxy. You are seeing across an unfathomable amount of space into a galaxy that is twice as big as our own.

[00:07:43]A galaxy that contains 1 trillion other stars.

[00:07:50]>> [music] [music] >> Here we are looking at our neighboring galaxies. This is called our local group. Right below Andromeda, this is a galaxy called Triangulum. It's about half the size of our galaxy and only contains around 40 billion stars. And all the tiny other dots that surround us, these are dwarf galaxies. There are roughly 50 to 80 of them in our local group. Here's a dwarf galaxy called Leo A. It only has a few million stars. It's just a small little guy.

[00:08:23]And it's the most isolated dwarf galaxy in our local group.

[00:08:27]Leo A is so isolated that it hasn't interacted with or been distorted by any other galaxies.

[00:08:35]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> You might notice something strange. The galaxies we see don't appear perfectly even in every direction. The left and right portions of our screen seem relatively full, but the bottom and top portions do not seem as dense.

[00:09:04]Astronomers call these regions the zone of avoidance.

[00:09:08]The gas and dust at the center of our galaxy gets in the way of certain areas of our sky, making it more difficult to see galaxies behind the gas and dust.

[00:09:16]>> [music] [music] [music] >> Obviously, there is a ton of galaxies we've discovered. And the average galaxy has an estimated 100 billion [music] stars.

[00:09:39]In total, there are 10,000 cataloged galaxies we are currently looking at, but that's just in this game. In reality, we have cataloged over 1,000,000 galaxies, and we estimate that there are 2,000,000,000,000 of them in only the observable part of our universe.

[00:09:54]So, again, if we could see all the real galaxies in our observable universe, it would look more like this.

[00:10:03]>> [music] >> And here's something exciting. This year, in 2026, we completed the biggest map of the universe ever created. Here's a video of DESI scanning the skies [music] and finding galaxies.

[00:10:15]Each dot represents a galaxy found. And as of April 2026, DESI has mapped over 47,000,000 galaxies. And again, this video highlights the zone of avoidance, where gas and dust from our own galaxy gets in the way of our observations. So, that's why we're seeing these two dark regions.

[00:10:33]Researchers even put together a video of flying through DESI's map of the observable universe. You can see the largest scale structure of our universe, called the cosmic web. It has dense areas of galaxies and glowing threads of gas [music] and dark matter. It's like the universe's ultimate super highway.

[00:10:50]And it's also a really good way to picture the empty voids in between galaxies. It's like the rural areas of our universe. It's where all the conservative aliens live.

[00:11:03]So, there you go. We've explored the biggest map of the universe that humanity has ever created. Now, if you ever get lost in the rural conservative alien voids, you can use this video to guide you home. And one last thing, thank you to my Patreon supporters, free or paid. It's $1 a month if you want to join, or there's a free option, too. And all the content I post there, anybody can access it, even if you join for free. It's okay. And subscribe to my YouTube channel for more videos, okay? Join my cult. We