One of the largest concepts known to humanity has been visualized by an American artist and musician. A depiction of the observable universe created by Pablo Carlos Budassi had, during the week before this article was published, attracted widespread attention online. Budassi shared the work through Wikimedia Commons.
According to the description accompanying the image, the artwork is a logarithmic view beginning with the Solar System at the centre. Moving outward, it represents the inner and outer planets, the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, Alpha Centauri, the Perseus Arm, the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, nearby galaxies, the large-scale web of galaxies, and the cosmic microwave background. At the outer edge, the illustration represents the extremely early universe associated with the Big Bang. [source]
Budassi explained in an interview that the idea grew out of his work with hexaflexagons. While making one as a birthday gift for his son, he began thinking about using a similar visual approach to construct a centred representation of the cosmos and Solar System. That same day he decided to use a logarithmic presentation. [source] [source] [source] [source] [source] [source] [source] [source] [source] [source]
After several days working in Photoshop with digital sky maps produced by the Sloan project, he completed the striking image.
A logarithmic scale makes it possible to represent distances vastly greater than ordinary human intuition can comfortably grasp within a finite picture. Instead of equal physical distances occupying equal space on the page, successive intervals increase by a multiplicative factor—here described as factors of ten. [source]
The original article links both to the full-resolution version of Budassi's image and to another visualization produced by astronomers at the University of Hawaiʻi showing the Milky Way's position among more than one hundred thousand neighbouring galaxies. Those links are preserved below. [source] [source] [source] [source]
