Google Helps You Kill Time With 100,000 Stars Experiment

If you're bored and looking for something to do to kill a bit of time, Google has a new Chrome Experiment called 100,000 Stars. The idea is that it is a map of the galaxy of roughly 100,000 stars that are close to the earth on a cosmic scale. Close on a cosmic scale means within a few light years.

The project allows users to zoom in and out using the mouse or track pad on a notebook. You can get more information on stars, including their name, and you can see a digital version of the real star. It reminds me a little of that old Windows screen saver with starts zooming by.

The 100,000 Stars website uses WebGL, CSS3D, and Web Audio technologies. Music for the site is from Sam Hulick, who also composed music for video games such as Mass Effect. The service has a "take a tour" button that you can click it will take you wanted to work of some of the most prominent stars near us. As the word "space" implies, outer space is vast.

As it is right now, the furthest man-made object from our star is the Voyager probe, and it's only 17 light hours away as it gets ready to leave our solar system. The nearest star system to our sun is Alpha Centauri, and it is 4.3 light-years away. I won't say that the 100,000 Stars experiment is as cool some of the real images that NASA offers, but it's up there with Google Space.

[via PC Mag]