hub
Explore: every destination COSMOS can take you to
Start with Earth, the Moon or a planet, then travel through measured Gaia stars to the Milky Way, Andromeda, neighbouring galaxies and surveyed cosmic structure. Choose a reference destination below or start a short, user-paced journey.
Measured facts
- Core reference destinations
- 22 reference pages, plus catalogue galaxies and cosmic regions in the explorer
- Solar System bodies
- 14 navigable bodies
- Measured stars
- 371,766 Gaia DR3 sources, 100 pc volume
- Galactic model
- 230,000 derived density tracers
- Planetary state
- JPL Horizons archive, 2020-01-01 00:00 TDB through 2040-01-01 00:00 TDB
- Requirements
- WebGL2 browser; these pages work without it
How destinations work
Every destination has a stable shareable address of the form /explore/name, plus a reference page with the full data record. The explore link opens the 3D explorer and flies the camera to that place, while the reference page keeps the facts, provenance and limitations in plain text for people who cannot or do not want to load WebGL.
Nothing here is behind an account, and no destination requires a plugin. If your browser cannot run WebGL2, the informational pages still contain the science: only the interactive view needs the renderer.
What each kind of destination contains
- Solar System bodies
- Published mean radius, archived position, delivered imagery resolution and an enforced camera floor
- Galilean moons
- Measured Jupiter-relative distance ranges from a Jupiter-centred archive
- Nearby stars
- Measured Gaia parallax, derived distance, proper motion and radial velocity where published
- Surface features
- IAU catalogue coordinates and diameter, on the parent body’s observational mosaic
- The Milky Way
- A declared, source-attributed density reconstruction — a model, labelled as one
Honest limits
- Unvalidated planetary appearances remain labelled proxies; the selected-object panel states each provider’s status.
- The separate Moon surface mode combines measured terrain and imagery with labelled representational ground detail and reconstructed Apollo hardware.
- Extragalactic centres use published catalogues. Galaxy interiors are reconstructed; the 2MRS view is a bounded redshift-space sample, not luminous filaments or a complete census.
- Positions are archived states inside a bounded window, never extrapolated and never live.
Content updated 2026-10-19. Every value on this page is computed from the shipped datasets; where a source publishes no value, the page says so instead of estimating one.