The Entire Universe In One Image

This article first appeared in ancient-code.com and is written by Ivan Petricevic

Have you ever wondered about what the ENTIRE ‘known’ universe looks like in ONE image? According to researchers, from what we know about the universe, it’s impossible to picture what it might look like crammed into ONE field of view, but that didn’t stop musician Pablo Carlos Budassi to combine logarithmic maps of the universe from Princeton and images from NASA creating an incredible image never before seen. In his creation, Budassi managed to portray the observable universe in ONE disc.

Budassi artistically placed the solar system and our sun at the center of the image, following the outer ring of the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way. Budassi then placed the Perseus arm of the Milky Way, which is a ring of other nearby galaxies like Andromeda, then the rest of the cosmic network, the cosmic microwave background radiation (The CMB is the first light that shone in the universe. It was emitted 370,000 years after the Big Bang), and finally, Budassi placed a ring of plasma which was believed to have been generated by the Big Bang. The result? This incredible-breathtaking image:

Using logarithms which help us make sense of huge distances (or numbers), Budassi managed to show all parts of the universe in a completely different way.

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. That’s why the entire observable universe can fit inside the circle. (source)

“Then when I was drawing hexaflexagons for my son’s 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.”

Ivan is a freelance writer, editor-in-chief of ancient-code.com, he also writes for EWAO, Share Knowledge, Svemir Online and Ancient Origins.