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Natural History, Sept, 2002 by Robert (American businessman and engineer) Anderson

After years of studying what happened in the first second after the big bang, British astrophysicist Richard Powell decided to create a Web site showing how we fit into the cosmos. "I wanted to see for myself what the universe looked like, and I thought maybe some other people out there might also be interested." Indeed they might. The result of his painstaking efforts, "An Atlas of the Universe" (anzwers.org/free /universe/index.html), is fascinating.

Powell starts his tour with the solar system--which, we learn, is only 0.000000000000000000000000000000 000000001 percent of the observable universe--and works his way outward. With each expanded slice of space, he provides quite a bit of information (for even more, check out his links to other sites). I learned, for example, that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is in the process of ripping apart a tiny galactic neighbor, Sagittarius Dwarf, and there's evidence that it has gobbled up others in the past.

The tour keeps going, taking us through the Local Group of galaxies, the Virgo Supercluster, the neighboring superclusters, and finally the observable universe. This cosmic horizon has a radius of 15 billion light-years, and Powell explains its dimensions this way: "The light from more distant objects simply has not had time to reach us. For this reason, everybody in the universe is at the middle of their own visine universe about 15 billion light-years in radius. The true size of the universe has to be much larger than this." Makes one feel kind of small, but at least we are once again at the center of the universe, if only the observable one.

Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.