Spiral Galaxy

Splashery stretches a drumhead over this Splash's outline, twelve inches across, and finds the ways it can ring. Its lowest is 348.5 Hz, 96 cents sharp of E4, the nearest tine on the comb. The next fifteen are its overtones, and each one draws its own figure: sand gathers on the lines that stay still.

Tap to swirl the arms. Pick a galaxy style in the Splash tab.

A galaxy is a huge family of stars, gas and dust held together by gravity. In a spiral galaxy, bright arms curl out from a glowing center. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is a spiral about 100,000 light-years across with hundreds of billions of stars, and the Sun takes about 230 million years to go around it once.

Here the spiral turns slowly as one piece while its stars orbit, the inner ones faster. The splash illustrates one idea for spiral arms: a moving density pattern that stars pass through, like traffic through a jam. Real galaxies can also have changing arms. Tap it to swirl the arms once around, fast, while the core flares. Pick the Milky Way or Andromeda style in the Splash tab.

Made in Splashery. Its code is MIT.

This link opens it in the Playground. To put it on your own page, add the element and one script tag. Every option.