Hands-on
The Hourglass in Your Hand
The Hourglass Nebula floats at arm's length: two rippled lobes with a bright eye at the waist. Turn it, step inside it, and replay how a dying star blew it.
Drag with one finger to turn it like a ball; pinch to make it bigger or smaller. Tap for its controls: the time slider and ▶ replay how it formed, the filter button swaps Both, Hα and O III, Step inside grows it round you, and Wind lets a swipe blow through the gas.
- The idea
- MyCn 18, the Hourglass. A dying star first sheds a slow, dusty wind; then its hot core blows a fast wind that sweeps the slow one into a thin shell, and its light ionises that shell, hydrogen first and then oxygen, as the star heats from 3,500 to about 150,000 K. The time axis is compressed and labelled, not to scale; your wind is a ripple, not real gas dynamics.
- With music
- It doesn't react to the music: it moves by itself, in silence too. Tap Demo beat for our own beat, or Your music to let it hear the room.
- How it runs
- It’s the same live simulation as in the Everdust apps, running in your browser on WebGL 2. If your device struggles, it lowers the detail a step at a time to keep the motion smooth.
This is just a taste
Loved The Hourglass in Your Hand? There are many more worlds in the app.
The Everdust app has every world at full detail, plus games made of physics, stories you step inside, Create (turn any photo into a world), and hand tracking on Vision Pro and Quest. Free during the beta.