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galactic view · Derived density reconstruction

Explore Milky Way in COSMOS

A constrained density reconstruction of our barred stellar disc, bulge, and inner halo. Its particles are model tracers—not measured individual stars and not a photograph from outside the Galaxy. The view is labelled as a reconstruction everywhere it appears, because no one has photographed the Milky Way from outside.

Fly to Milky WayFull Milky Way data record

Measured facts

Representation
Derived density reconstruction — a labelled model, not an observation
Tracers
230,000 weighted points from five cited structural components
Model boundary
20 kpc Galactocentric radius, not extrapolated beyond
How it connects
Cross-fades with the measured Gaia volume between 40 pc and 1 kpc

What opens when you follow this link

COSMOS opens in the same continuous 3D scene and moves the camera to Milky Way. Nothing reloads, and the breadcrumb trail stays clickable for the way back outward through the Solar System, the measured stellar catalogue and the Galactic view.

If your browser cannot run WebGL2, this page is still the useful part: it carries the identity, the measured values and the provenance, in text.

Where the full record lives

This page is the share link. The complete data record for Milky Way — delivered imagery resolution, observation epoch, source licence, processing chain and every disclosed limitation — is on its reference page, which is linked below.

Read this before quoting it

  • Empty regions are omissions, not non-detections.
  • The points are density tracers, not stars or mass.
  • Spiral arms, dust, gas, warp, flare, streams and dark matter are not modelled in version 1.
  • The declared model boundary is not extrapolated.

Datasets behind this page

Content updated 2026-09-26. 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.