"We're probably not in the center of the universe"
The way I understood things, there is no center of the universe. Or equivalently, all points in the universe have a view such that it appears that you are in the center of the universe. The universe is spacetime itself, and the idea of a center requires an idea of space outside of spacetime, no?
Nobody knows what the topology of the universe is, nor, contrary to this animation, does anyone have a reliable estimate for the size of the universe (as opposed to just the observable universe). It might be infinite, or it might be just slightly larger than the observable universe.
But yes, all current models of the universe are homogeneous; no point is more central than any other point. It doesn't have to be this way, but it's the simplest assumption.
"Yes and no". The universe is not homogeneous on a large scale, there are filaments of galaxies and everything but yes the idea of the center of the universe does not correspond to anything. The Big Bang from current models happened everywhere and the expansions comes from the fact that the very "fabric" of the universe expands.
But there are some awesome implications of an infinite universe, take a look here if you are interested:
In the sense of matter distribution, the universe isn't homogeneous on small scales either. But that's not what is meant in the context of a cosmological model. The global spacetime is modeled with a FLRW metric, whose key property is homogeneity and isotropy.
If the laws of physics as we understand them hold true, then by definition we (or any other observer anywhere) are at the centre of the universe they see, insomuch as the further away we look, the further back in time we look, in all directions, back to the beginning... or something along those lines. Unless we find we can circumvent the rules we know now, or that they don't hold true, anything outside our light-cone, outside our observable universe by definition cannot be shown to exist.
Yes, I was surprised to see the old one posted here when this new fancy version has recently been made. It has at least twice as many things, and lots of educational text when you click them (although I think he got bored writing them after a point.) The science is more on point than the old one too.
Resubmission after months or years have passed allows new readers a chance to enjoy an article. It is indeed helpful, however, if there is a comment linking to the previous discussions.
I'd love to see a case study or profile of the creation of this. Over the last 10 years and in multiple communities, I've seen the underlying Flash animation to this appear and do well every single time. It must be one of the most seen Flash animations ever, yet it continues to do well every time despite being very simply produced.
Sadly their MySQL server went down, and no one took the time to configure PHP correctly :(
> Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 111 in /home/primax/public_html/dbcon.php on line 14
Could not connect database
Well, HTML5 can't reliably do audio yet. :) But nothing in this animation looks hard at all to recreate in JavaScript / HTML5. The most annoying bit would be to convert the art pieces (which I assume are swf vector art) to a format that you can render with HTML5. In Canvas, png sucks for magnification and I'm not aware of any functional swf exporter + vector canvas renderer library. If you go the DOM route with transforms, SVG may do the trick and there should be vector tools that can import swf and export SVG.
In summary, HTML5 can definitely do it, but for now it's much easier in Flash.
The way I understood things, there is no center of the universe. Or equivalently, all points in the universe have a view such that it appears that you are in the center of the universe. The universe is spacetime itself, and the idea of a center requires an idea of space outside of spacetime, no?