Space is so hard to fathom, but thanks to this image, painstakingly compiled and combined by a musician and artist, one get start to get a sense of it within a single visual frame.

Pablo Carlos Budassi used photos from NASA rovers, orbiting satellites and other astronomical footage, then combined them into a singular shot of the known universe, using Earth as a center point.

The key to the image’s success is the use of a logarithmic scale, which helps viewers understand large numbers and distances more easily, each ring covering vastly greater space than the last. Our world and solar system look relatively large, a helpful jumping off point as the rings expand. The trick works somewhat like the classic Powers of 10 video, a classic educational device for understanding universal and microscopic scales, executed by zooming way out and way in, but with time frames likewise set in a log scale (film shown below, and well worth watching!).

From Colossal: “Budassi was aided by similar (though less visually stunning) logarithmic maps produced by astronomers at Princeton back in 2005. In this map, our sun and solar system are seen in the middle, followed by the Milky Way Galaxy, another ring of nearby galaxies like Andromeda, all the way out to cosmic radiation and plasma generated by the big bang on the furthest outskirts of the image.”

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The announcement that scientists had finally detected measurable proof of the Big Bang – the very beginning of our universe – was met with awe and joy. And, for a lot of us, utter befuddlement. Gravitational waves? Cosmic inflation? Accelerating expansion? These aren’t terms that the average person immediately understands. Luckily for the folks who can’t wrap their heads around this amazing news, New Scientist made a video explaining the discovery in simple terms.

In the video above, a towel, an apple, and a ping pong ball are used to explain how scientists were able to detect gravitational waves dating all the way back to the birth of the universe. It’s heavy material, but explained in a fun way. We still don’t really get it, but that’s okay – that’s why we’re not astrophysicists.

If you need a refresher course on the entire theory of the beginning of the universe, this animation from Munich “information designers” Kurzgesagt breaks it down for you. It’s definitely worth a watch if you’ve ever wondered what happened between the Big Bang and the formation of stars and planets. Just don’t watch it when you’re sleepy, because the narrator’s voice is so soothing you’ll drift off to his explanations of hydrogen gas and plasma. Not that we know from experience or anything.

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Space is so unimaginably vast that it seems unlikely the human race will ever really be able to grasp the actual size of the universe in which we live. But that doesn’t mean we’ll ever stop trying. This map is the most detailed, most complete 3D depiction of the known universe ever created – and it took over a decade to make.

(click above image to enlarge)

The Two-Micron All-Sky Survey (or 2MASS) scanned the entire sky in three near-infrared wavelength bands. Redshifts, or measurements of galaxy distances, were added later to provide a more complete picture of the universe. This map extends to more than 380 million light-years and shows over 43,000 galaxies. The only part of the sky not mapped – represented by the black band in the middle of the map – is the part we can’t see behind our own Milky Way galaxy.

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Almost everyone wonders at one time or another what may have happened if they had taken a different direction in life. What if you had applied for that dream job or pursued a different major in college? What may have happened if you’d had the courage to talk to that gorgeous stranger waiting for the train? According to some theories, you did take all of those alternate routes – or at least parallel copies of you did. The theory of parallel universes suggests that infinite copies of each of us exist in infinite worlds. The strange device above was designed by Patrick Stevenson-Keating to give users a glimpse into what their other lives could have been like.

The Quantum Parallelograph uses online sources to cull information about your parallel selves, then prints off a short blurb about the lives of the other yous. The creator of the device warns that if you dare to look into the multiverse to see yourself, you may not be pleased with what you find. It begs the question: if you found out that a parallel version of you was leading a happier, more successful, more fulfilled life, would you be pleased? Or would you be jealous?

The device itself is just a novelty, but it does raise some very good questions about our fundamental understanding of our world. The concept of parallel universes is much more widely explored among the scientific community than one might expect, lending some legitimacy to this seemingly kooky idea. However, as far as we know there is still no way to gaze across the multiverse and see other versions of ourselves in their own lives, so for now we have to be content with novelties like this one that open our imaginations.

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The mysterious substance called “dark matter” has been fascinating (and confounding) scientists since Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky first hypothesized its existence in 1933. According to Zwicky (and other astronomers who have subsequently noted unexplainable astronomical phenomena) the spin rate of galaxies cannot be entirely accounted for by the mass of their stars emitting visible light. Therefore, there must be some other mysterious material in the galaxies – this is what has come to be known as dark matter. Figuring that dark matter exists everywhere in the universe, scientists here on Earth have decided to build a lab deep underground to try to detect the substance on our very own home planet.

The Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, or DUSEL, is located in an 8000-foot-deep hole in the ground in Lead, South Dakota. The hole was once a successful gold mine and the town’s primary source of employment. Since its closure in 2002 it has been sitting unused, but the National Science Foundation is now using the former mine as the world’s deepest underground lab. The team of physicists will use liquid xenon to detect the as-yet undetected dark matter that may make up as much as 80 percent of the matter in the universe.

According to the team, dark matter particles are extremely difficult to detect but three or four per year will just coincidentally bump into the nucleus of one of the 1.6 octillion xenon atoms contained in DUSEL’s LUX (large underground xenon) detector. If the detection method works, the team may finally prove the existence of one of the most mysterious substances ever. However, the team in South Dakota is far from alone in this quest: at least 10 teams worldwide are using various methods in the race to identify dark matter particles here on Earth.

(via PopSci)

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