Model of the Solar Neighborhood

This is a model of the stars that are at most 12 light years from the sun (except for a few brown dwarfs recently discovered by WISE). I built the model in the winter of 2012-13. The stars it represents, along with their spectral types and distances from the sun in light years, are listed towards the bottom of this page.

The model is composed of painted solid wooden balls and dowels. The balls represent stars, and are sized and colored, to represent the stellar diversity in the solar neighborhood, according to the following scheme.

Two stars are connected by a dowel if and only if they are no more than 10 light years away from one another. The longest dowel, which is also the only rod connected to only one ball (which represents the sun), indicates the direction of the galactic center. The surface of the table runs parallel to the galactic plane.

To construct the model, I calculated the necessary angles by transforming the coordinates from polar equatorial with 0 degrees at the vernal equinox (those that are found in most ephemerides) to polar galactic with the sun as origin and 0 degrees along the line that connects the sun to the galactic center. See the transformations here. I then drilled the holes at appropriate places in the balls and cut the dowels to appropriate lengths. I then painted the balls according to the scheme above, and painted each of the dowels. The model can be taken apart and put back together (as long as one is careful about keeping track of which dowels connect which holes in which balls).

The stars represented in the model are:

There are four brown dwarfs that were discovered by WISE, and were announced in the spring of 2013, not long after I finished constructing the model. As a result, they are not depicted. Those stars are:

I plan to integrate these newly discovered neighbors into a future version of the model.