What the universe looks like in one image

It is almost impossible to picture the vast universe crammed into one image.

However, Pablo Carlos Budassi, a musician, combined the logarithmic maps of the universe from Princeton and images from NASA to create an image showing the observable universe in one disc, reports Tech Insider.

At the very centre of the image are our sun and our solar system. The image then shows the outer ring of our Milky Way galaxy, followed by the Perseus arm of the Milky Way, a ring of other galaxies like Andromeda which are nearby, cosmic microwave background radiation which are left over from the big bang, and a ring of plasma that was also generated by the big bang.  

Use of logarithms in this case helped here to make sense of the huge distances. In the image, each chunk of the circle represents a field of view several orders of magnitude larger the one before it, instead of showing the whole universe on a linear scale, which makes it possible for the entire observable universe to fit inside the circle.

The idea of making the image came to Budassi after he made hexaflexagons for his son's birthday.

"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," he added.

He has created a few other log scales too, and released the image into public domain.