Galaxy 3D Simulator

Up to 100,000 points form the spiral arms on desktop (30,000 on phones so rotation stays smooth) - a real feel for how thin and vast a galaxy's disk is.

Key features

• Color follows structure - a warm dense core fading to blue-white arms with scattered hot stars - all procedural, no images.
• Drag to rotate, scroll or pinch to zoom, and one click goes fullscreen; a slow auto-rotation keeps the scene moving when you leave it idle.

Working the spiral-arm controls

Every control sits beside the scene. Drag anywhere to rotate the galaxy; the camera carries damping, so motion eases to a stop instead of cutting off. Scroll with a wheel or pinch on a touchscreen to zoom, and pull in close enough that the disk resolves into individual points around the warm core. One click on Fullscreen expands the scene to the whole display.

Press New spiral to rebuild the galaxy with a fresh arm count, anywhere from 3 to 5 arms, and a new scatter pattern, so no two spirals look alike. The old geometry is disposed of on each rebuild, which keeps graphics memory steady through a long session. The status line above the scene reports the exact figures in play: how many points are rendered and how many arms they form.

What the page needs to run

The 3D engine downloads once, about 0.7 MB, then stays cached, so later visits start faster. Every point is drawn on your own device: nothing is uploaded, no server does any drawing, and there is no install and no account. On a browser or device with WebGL disabled the page says so plainly and the facts panel below keeps working rather than leaving a black box.

Real Milky Way figures

The facts panel carries the real Milky Way figures:

Art tuned to look right, not physics

Worth being clear about what the spiral is: it is parametric art tuned to look right, not a gravitational simulation and not a map of real star catalogs - the facts-panel figures are the accurate part, while the rendered points are stand-ins and the arm shapes are not physics-modeled.

For the cases this scene suits best, read when to use the Galaxy 3D Simulator or how it compares with other galaxy viewers. The Space 3D collection also includes a Solar System 3D Explorer and a Black Hole 3D Visualizer.