Scale of the Universe Explorer (Interactive Zoom)
Zoom across orders of magnitude—from atoms and DNA to planets, galaxies, and the observable universe. This tool uses a curated dataset and a log-scale zoom so you can build intuition for sizes, units, and comparisons. Everything runs in your browser.
Zoom
Use the slider or scroll to zoom across orders of magnitude (log scale).
Guided tour
Scale snapshot
Scale of the Universe Explorer
Selected: City (across)
Size
20 km
Cities vary dramatically, but a mid-sized city might be tens of kilometers across.
Quick comparisons
Favorites
No favorites yet.
Privacy: favorites and last zoom are stored locally in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Search objects
Tip: selecting an object jumps the zoom to its scale with a smooth transition.
Why scale is hard to intuit (and why log scales help)
The universe spans an extreme range of sizes. A proton is around \(10^-15\) meters, while the observable universe is around \(10^26\) meters across. That’s about 41 orders of magnitude. A linear slider can’t represent that range well, so this explorer uses a logarithmic (log) scale: each equal step represents a multiplicative change, not an additive one.
From microscopic to cosmic
Use the search to jump directly to objects like DNA, bacteria, a human, Earth, the Sun, or the Milky Way. The guided tour provides a curated path across scales, which is often the fastest way to build intuition if you’re learning these ideas for the first time.
Units: meters, kilometers, AU, light-years
Small sizes are easiest to read in nanometers and micrometers; human scale is in meters; Earth-scale and beyond uses kilometers; solar system distances are commonly expressed in astronomical units (AU); and interstellar scales use light-years. This tool switches to astronomy-friendly units at large sizes so the numbers stay readable.
Privacy and exports
You can favorite objects and export a branded PNG snapshot of the selected object card. Favorites and your last zoom level are stored in localStorage. This tool runs entirely in the browser and does not upload your inputs to a server.