Blending Art and Science

I’ve written before about space art and astronomy visualization, but there’s always a new artist or a new way of looking at the universe popping up.  There are whole clans of people who work on finding ways to take astronomy data and turn it into eye-smacking artwork and images.  In turn, we can all look at their work and understand a little bit better how the cosmos looks and behaves.

Take the cosmological visualization I’ve posted here. It’s actually quite a nice piece of artwork and I’d have no problem with hanging a print of it in my office. But, like all art, you have to ask: “what does it mean?”  To an artist, it may represent a balance of light and dark, a gradation of colors, a counterpoint of smooth and active textures and regions of heaviness and lightness, all blended into one painting.

But, look at it with scientific curiousity and it becomes a visualization of the process of cosmic creation.  It depicts, from right to left, the emergence of large-scale structure in our cosmos in the epochs after the Big Bang, which took place just off the right side of this image (and some 13.7 billion years ago in real time).

After the Big Bang, the universe began a headlong expansion effort that continues today.  Free electrons and protons began forming atomic hydrogen, the first — and most abundant — element in the cosmos. Those atoms could absorb light, which they did, turning the cosmos into a murky place. This period is called,  appropriately enough, the Cosmic Dark Ages. The golden area depicts that murky time. It may look bland, but there was action going on there as atoms of hydrogen crowded together to make the first stars.

About 900 million years later, the universe began lighting up as those first stars and the massive quasars began generating ultraviolet light, which turned hydrogen atoms back to protons and electrons. In the process the universe began to light up again. This was the Epoch of Reionization. At first it occurred in isolated bubbles, but as time went by, they spread out and connected, and eventually the universe was freed of its murky dark ages. Light could travel freely as the galaxies and stars continued forming and expanding.

So, this picture (created by the Goddard Science Visualization Studio) is really an artful depiction of the Cosmic Dawn, using real science data to draw imagery of a time we could never see or experience for ourselves (in real time).  Isn’t it amazing?