Drag to rotate · Scroll to zoom · The cosmic web at hundreds of millions of light-years
At this scale you are seeing: The cosmic web
On the largest scales the universe is not laid out at random. Hundreds of billions of galaxies gather along vast filaments of matter — the cosmic web — separated by enormous voids that hold almost no galaxies at all.
To fly from Earth out to the cosmic web, see the Zoom journey. The zoom journey
Each step below is tens to hundreds of times larger than the one before. The shell radii in the model are compressed to fit the view — drawn to true scale, the Milky Way would be smaller than a pixel.
Our galaxy, holding 100–400 billion stars. At the scale of this page, the whole thing is a single dot.
About 80 gravitationally bound galaxies, dominated by the Milky Way and Andromeda — which are approaching each other and will merge in roughly 4.5 billion years.
The Local Group is a small outlying branch of the Virgo Supercluster, thousands of galaxies gathered around the Virgo Cluster at its centre.
Defined in 2014 by tracking galaxy motions: galaxies falling toward the same gravitational focus belong to one supercluster. The entire Virgo Supercluster sits inside Laniakea.
The part of the universe whose light has had time to reach us. Its edge is not a wall but a limit of sight — an observer in another galaxy has a different horizon.
This model reproduces the morphology of the cosmic web — filaments, nodes and voids — rather than simulating it: no gravity between dark matter halos is computed. Node positions are random and correspond to no real galaxy cluster. The figures in the table come from observation.