The universe in one image
The universe is so vast its almost impossible to picture what it might look like crammed into one field of view, reports Tech Insider.
But musician Pablo Carlos Budassi managed to do it by combining logarithmic maps of the universe from Princeton and images from NASA. He created the image below that shows the observable universe in one disc.
Our sun and solar system are at the very center of the image, followed by the outer ring of our Milky Way galaxy, the Perseus arm of the Milky Way, a ring of other nearby galaxies like Andromeda, the rest of the cosmic web, cosmic microwave background radiation leftover from the big bang, and finally a ring of plasma also generated by the big bang:
Logarithms help us make sense of huge numbers, and in this case, huge distances. Rather than showing all parts of the universe on a linear scale, each chunk of the circle represents a field of view several orders of magnitude larger than the one before it. Thats why the entire observable universe can fit inside the circle.
Budassi got the idea after making hexaflexagons for his sons birthday one year. (If you havent seen a hexaflexagon in action, get ready to have your mind blown.)
Then when I was drawing hexaflexagons for my sons birthday souvenirs I started drawing central views of the cosmos and the solar system, Budassi told Tech Insider in an email.
That day the idea of a logarithmic view came and in the next days I was able to [assemble] it with photoshop using images from NASA and some textures created by my own.
He released the image into public domain, and has created a few other log scales, too.
The image is a solar system centric view of our universe. This essentially means that our Sun and Solar System are at the very center of the image. They are followed by the outer ring of our Milky Way galaxy, the Perseus arm (one of two major spiral arms of the Milky Way), a ring of other nearby galaxies like Andromeda, the rest of the cosmic web, cosmic microwave background radiation leftover from the big bang, and finally a ring of plasma that was also generated by the big bang.
This illustration is rather handy because, in short, logarithms allow us to comprehend large values.
Instead of showing all parts of the universe on a linear scale, each chunk of the disc represents a field of view several orders of magnitude larger than the one before it. Thats why the entire observable universe can fit inside the circle.
And we need this, because the universe is very large. Roughly 13.75 billion years ago, our universe came into existence. Very shortly thereafter, primordial light started shooting across the cosmos and spreading throughout the cosmos. Since its inception, the cosmos has been growing at an ever increasing rate. Cosmologists estimate that the oldest photons that we can observe have traveled a distance of 45-47 billion light years since the big bang. That means that our observable universe is some 93 billion light-years wide (give or take a few light years).
Budassi was drawing hexaflexagons for his sons birthday souvenirs when he started drawing central views of the cosmos. The idea of a logarithmic view came to him and he was able to create the image using Photoshop.
