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Local Bubble

About Local Galactic Structures

What you're looking at

This is an interactive 3D map of the Solar neighborhood, showing real stars, star clusters, stellar associations, and molecular clouds out to roughly 800 pc from the Sun, each placed at its actual derived Galactic XYZ position — not sketched or hand-placed. Three toggleable overlays let you compare competing large-scale interpretations of the region's shape: the Gould Belt, the Radcliffe Wave, and the Local Bubble — the cavity of hot, rarefied gas the Sun itself sits inside.

Data & methodology

The catalog (956 objects) is built from live lookups against SIMBAD, Gaia, and VizieR (via Astropy/astroquery), backed by cited literature distances where a direct catalog match isn't available. Some candidate names were first identified from a Galaxy Map "Gaia star density map" poster and from the RECONS "100 Nearest Star Systems" census, but only as a list of names to look up: every position and distance shown here comes from a live SIMBAD/Gaia resolution, never read off an image or table.

The three structure overlays are each a separate, literature-fitted scientific model, not raw data:

  • Gould Belt — Perrot & Grenier (2003), A&A 404, 519–531
  • Radcliffe Wave — Konietzka et al. (2024), "The Radcliffe Wave is oscillating," Nature 626, 63–68
  • Local Bubble — Alves et al. (2018), "The Local Bubble: a magnetic veil to our Galaxy," A&A 611, L5

Coordinates use a heliocentric Galactic Cartesian frame, in parsecs: the Sun sits at the origin, +X points toward the Galactic Center, +Y toward the direction of Galactic rotation, and +Z toward the North Galactic Pole.

The data pipeline is Python/Astropy; the scene you're navigating is rendered in the browser with Three.js.