Artist Pablo Carlos Budassi creates logarithmic image maps to show scale of entire universe

An artist used logarithmic maps to visualise the entire universe. Pablo Carlos Budassi, a South American artist and musician, made the image using maps from Princeton University and images from Nasa taken with satellites and telescopes.

Our solar system is shown at the centre of the image, and nearby galaxies are surrounding it. Towards the outer edge, Budassi illustrated the after-effects of the big bang, with cosmic microwave background radiation and a ring of plasma.

Seeing as the image was made using a logarithmic scale, the further you get from the centre of the circle, the greater the difference is in distance.

For example, imagine a line drawn from the centre of the solar system, straight down to the outer edge of the image. Every centimetre along that line, you draw a small dash. The distance between dashes in the image – or the universe – is ten times bigger in real life, than the gap before it.

Budassi claims that the idea for the image came to him when he was creating hexaflexagons for his son's birthday. Hexaflexagons are flat, folded pieces of paper that can be folded in certain ways to show different colours; similar to a type of origami designed to show pictures.

"When I was drawing hexaflexagons for my [son's] birthday souvenirs, I started drawing central views of the cosmos and the solar system," said Budassi to Tech Insider. "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."

Since the release of Budassi's first image, he has since made another logarithmic image of space. This time though, he created a closer image of the solar system, with the outer galaxies towards the edge.