measured star destination · True-scale educational sphere
Explore Sun in COSMOS
The Solar System's star, placed from an interpolated JPL Horizons state archive at the selected date. Its simple glow is an educational proxy, not an observation of the photosphere. Its position in the explorer is a measured Gaia DR3 point, not an illustration, and the distance comes from its parallax.
What opens when you follow this link
COSMOS opens in the same continuous 3D scene and moves the camera to Sun. 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 Sun — delivered imagery resolution, observation epoch, source licence, processing chain and every disclosed limitation — is on its reference page, which is linked below.
Datasets behind this page
- JPL Horizons planetary state archive (2020–2040)NASA/JPL Horizons · derived-scientific-model · One discrete geometric state vector per object at JD 2461281.5 TDB
- SDO HMI/AIA solar disk layer foundationNASA Solar Dynamics Observatory · observational · Pending selected product and instrument sampling validation
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.