Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is a vast disk-shaped system of 200 to 400 billion stars. The sun is but one of them - located 30,000 light-years away from its center, close to the inner edge of the Orion spiral arm - and was formed about 5 billion years ago out of interstellar gas and dust. Since then it orbited the center of the Milky Way less than 25 times. Mankind evolved on one of the Sun's nine planets during the last one hundredth of the current orbit. Leave the solar system, and find your way among the stars in the solar neighborhood by constructing a 3D-model which shows the actual position of the sun and the 36 brightest stars within 100 light-years. Then join SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - and look for radio signals from technical civilizations like ours which might have evolved throughout the Milky Way.

(Age 7+)