Backyard Worlds brown dwarfs and the Milky Way

This three-dimensional tour begins tens of thousands of light-years above the Milky Way’s disk. The solar neighborhood is merely a small speck toward our galaxy’s upper left portion from this vantage point. Flying in toward the Sun’s local neighborhood, we whiz through millions of stars in the Milky Way’s halo. Upon reaching the solar neighborhood, we see the newly discovered Backyard Worlds brown dwarfs as white orbs accompanied by a blue grid with 15 light-year spacing. The brown dwarfs, in their present-day configuration, are viewed from different angles. We then witness from several perspectives the dispersal of these brown dwarfs, which are moving relative to the Sun, throughout the Milky Way over millions of years. Finally, we begin zooming in toward our own Solar System, with a yellowish glow representing the Sun’s halo. Colorful ellipses indicate the orbits of solar system planets, with the Earth in light blue as the third ring from the Sun. The tour ends with a close-up of Earth seen from multiple perspectives, with “constellations” of the newly discovered Backyard Worlds brown dwarfs (white circles) looming in the background.