Changelog
What's new, and since when.
The most interesting changes to Horizon, newest first.
New experiences
- Afterglow: the Sun's whole life in nine chapters, from the faint young Sun through the red giant and the nebula to the cooling white dwarf. You watch from low orbit over Earth, Mars, Europa, Enceladus or Pluto, while Earth's oceans dry out below. The guide is timed to the music.
Everywhere
- A new ambient track, "The Last Breath".
- Black-hole readouts print their numbers in the visitor's language.
Science audit
- Corrected figures include Andromeda at 761 kpc (Cepheid distance), Parker's Alfvén-surface crossing at 19.8 R☉ and Makemake's mean radius at 739 km.
- Earth's perihelion is found for Earth itself, not the Earth–Moon barycentre.
Solar system
- An Earth-centred view showing the planets' paths as seen from here.
- A chaptered timeline of the system's history, with dated milestones such as Jupiter's core, Mars's growth and the Chang'e 5 lavas.
- History you can see: Saturn's rings appear only at their dated age, and the Moon recedes from Earth following dated records in rocks.
Voyage
- Tour steps print their formulas, and the trip to α Centauri at one g shows the ship's clock against Earth's.
Everywhere
- Keyboard:
?opens the guided tour, and the arrow keys step through the controls.
Science audit
- The radiation density now follows from the CMB temperature with 3.044 neutrino species.
- GW231123's remnant is corrected to 225 M☉.
New labs
- Giants: a true-scale ladder of 25 bodies, from a city-sized neutron star past the largest stars to black-hole horizons.
- Put any two bodies side by side, or see all of them at once as dots on a log scale.
- Surfaces are physical: colour from temperature, limb darkening, flowing granulation, Vega and Achernar flattened by their spin, and outflows from red supergiants.
- Every star sits on a shared HR diagram.
- The Sun: one star in eight views.
- Cut it open to see the interior from the standard solar model.
- Switch the light: white light, Hα, extreme ultraviolet, eclipse or magnetogram.
- Fly over sunspots drawn from a real solar photograph, with the active regions observed in May 2024.
- Watch a flux rope reconnect and erupt, and follow the solar cycle.
- Ride along with Parker Solar Probe past the corona's edge.
New experiences
- Voyage: fly a ship from the Moon to the edge of the reachable universe at true scale. It has three drives (Voyager, light sail, torch ship), a ship clock against an Earth clock, and a sky that aberrates and Doppler-shifts at speed.
Spacecraft in 3D
- Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, New Horizons, Parker Solar Probe, Hubble, Chandra and Webb as NASA 3D models at their true size.
- Fly up to them in the Solar system, meet Voyager 1 in Deep Field's drift, and park beside a probe in Voyage.
Solar system
- Dwarf planets: Ceres, Haumea, Makemake and Eris.
- True-size close-ups: fly up to any body, with a double tap as the shortcut.
Deep Field
- A cosmic atlas from real surveys (Cosmicflows-4, DESI DR1, CLASSIX), shown as data, illustration or both.
- The microwave background drawn from the Planck and ACT maps.
- The dark universe: the Milky Way's dark halo, the COSMOS-Web lensing map and an expansion view.
- Portrait framing, so the whole sky fits on a phone.
Black holes and Stellar spectra
- Black holes render faster while the camera only orbits.
- Stellar spectra places its stars on the shared HR diagram.
Everywhere
- A guided tour of the controls in every lab, behind the
?button. - One view picker in every lab; on small screens the toolbar folds into "More tools".
- Figures open in a zoomable, resizable dialog.
- Body cards open the same body in the other labs.
- Two more ambient tracks ("Vast Empty Space", "The Star Rings"), plus previous-track and media-key control.
- Catalogue tiles with layered parallax artwork.
- Czech: the right plural form beside every figure.
Science audit
- Every figure now comes from one sourced catalogue.
Solar system
- Moons with measured maps, including Phobos, Deimos and six of Saturn's (Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Iapetus).
Everywhere
- Drift: the camera flies itself, timed to the music.
- A free-flight camera, with keyboard and gamepad.
- Picture settings: four quality levels, anti-aliasing, bloom and lens effects.
- A notice when a new version has been deployed.