Prepare yourself for a very special cosmic online adventure. Taking inspiration from the opening scene of Contact (1997), a team of web designers have built an interactive site which tracks how far the radio waves of many of Earth’s #1 pop hits have travelled since the moment they were each released. For instance, because Pluto is only 5 light-hours away from Earth, the New Horizons spacecraft (which just arrived there yesterday) would be listening to Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” — still relatively fresh music. But Billy Murray’s hit “The Grand Old Rag” from 1906 — one of the first songs ever played on radio — has travelled a whopping 109 light-years from Earth. To take the fascinating voyage on your own visit LightYear.fm and you can use your mouse to scroll in or out (i.e. return to Earth or go further away) to scan the cosmos. You can also use the handy light-year ruler on the left of your screen for quicker jumps through time.
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