Google Maps The Galaxy With '100,000 Stars' Experiment (PHOTOS)

Google Maps The Galaxy With '100,000 Stars' Experiment
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You might think Street View is cool, but Google has taken its quest for mapping perfection to another level - by visualising 100,000 stars in perfect 3D.

Users of the new galactic 'map' can zoom between the Sun, the stars closest to our Solar System and just a small fraction of the billions in the Milky Way.

Users can click on individual stars for more information about its size and composition, while a score by Mass Effect composer Sam Hulick plays in the background.

It is a haunting and inspiring portrayal of the scale of the galaxy, and the vast distances which lie between our home and alien worlds orbiting far-off suns.

The app is optimised for Google's Chrome Browser as part of its 'Chrome Experiments' series.

The search giant has previously launched maps of the surface of Mars and the Moon.

In a blog post, Google said:

Visualizing the exact location of every star in the galaxy is a problem of, well, galactic proportions. With over 200 billion stars, capturing every detail of the Milky Way currently defies scientists and laptops alike. However, using imagery and data from a range of sources, including NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), we were recently able to take one small step in that direction by plotting the location of the stars closest to our sun.