The Art of Astrophysics

Try to line up you view to see Orion as seen from the Northern Hemisphere of Earth. Then explore the group of stars from different angles.

Photo by Frank Cone
Edited to highlight Orion

Artists have long taken inspiration from the stars. This painting by Van Gogh is one such example. In this 1888 painting: 'Starry Night Over the Rhône', the section of the constellation Ursa Major known as The Plough (UK) or The Big Dipper (US) can clearly be seen in the centre of the composition.

Public domain

Astrophysicist Mercedes Richards was an advocate for raising the profile of science in here home nation of Jamaica. Her passion for poetry and playing the violin exemplifies the power of the arts and culture to enrich the sciences. 

In this poem from 1984, Richards paints a picture of a quiet town with clear night skies that allows her to reconnect with the beauty of nature.

Photo: Sam Willis

This limerick was written for Poetry at Work Day 2017 and goes out to anyone who dreams of adventure or strives to understand the universe around us. 

Written for the NASA OSIRIS-REx Challenge in 2016. When the retrieval mission returns, this poem will be included in the time capsule.

This quotation by American astronomer, Maria Mitchell embodies The MoSAIC's philosophy of integrating the arts into the sciences.

"We especially need imagination in science. It is not all logic, nor all mathematics, but is somewhat beauty and poetry."

Betelgeuse (commonly pronounced Beetle juice) is a red supergiant star approximately 500 light years from Earth. You can locate it at the top left hand corner of the constellation Orion. 

This poem is inspired by Katie Mack's Disorientation, using similar techniques to Mack, including anaphora (the repetition at the start of a verse or phrase), alliteration and metaphor.

Performed by: Senanga Kuti
Written by: Sthabile Kolwa
Produced by: Fabian Pichler

℗ Synchrotron Music
Courtesy of Dr Sthabile Kolwa

How are these two images different?

The are both of the Pillars of Creation. Columns of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula. Approximately 6500 light years from Earth made famous by the Hubble image on the left. 

Light from brighter sources (in this case stars) creates diffraction spikes to form on the image. Notice the shapes of the diffraction spikes caused by the different mirror arrangements of the two space telescopes. This is a quick way to distinguish James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images from Hubble images.

Because JWST is sensitive to near-infrared light, we can now see through more of the opaque dust of the pillars into region where new stars are being born.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has produced the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Each point of light is a not a star but a galaxy. 

Look at the diffraction spike sculptures, how can you tell that image was likely taken by JWST?

Read the description of the Red Shift Sculpture. What do you think this means about the galaxies that appear red in this deep field image?

Katie Mack is an astrophysicist and science communicator who uses poetry to share her wonder of the universe. Mack uses a lot of alliteration and metaphor in her poetry to create rich imagery, leaving us with an overwhelming sense of scale.

These last lines of Mack's poem 'Disorientation' leave the reader feeling reassured that despite the threat of feeling insignificant when looking at the cosmos we are actually the universe being in awe of itself.

In 1919, astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington produced one of the first pieces of evidence that Albert Einstein theories about gravity were superior to Newton's. This digital painting based on Eddington's photograph the 1919 total solar eclipse is a homage to this feat of both astronomy and photography that displayed that light is bent by a gravitational field. Sir Isaac Newton could not have imagined this to be correct in his life time but the famous eclipse photograph by Eddington, with the sunlight obscured by the Moon, showed that the light from distant stars had been bent around our Sun.

This image is not a simulation designed by a human, but it is also not a direct recording of the light around the black hole by something like a camera. It falls under a different category called a “computational image”. This technique relies on matching computational and mathematical models to observations made with telescopes, microscopes, or even mobile phones. 

In recent decades, computational images have become widespread; examples range from internal images of the human body taken via Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to low-light photography with the latest iPhone. These images are not just raw observational data, found artefacts, because they would never exist as images without the technology that we have carefully designed to produce them. At the same time, they are not just visualisations or simulations of data—arbitrary assignments of visual characteristics to non-visual measurements. The way they look, and what they suggest about physical or spatial characteristics to our eyes, is a result of mathematical and computational processes that discover physical structures based on the observation of the light coming from those structures. 

Most of the material swirling around the Milky Way's central black hole, Sagittarius A*, lies in a flattened pancake-like structure called an "accretion disk." Periodically, telescopes observing the galactic centre detect very bright eruptions, or flares, originating close to the accretion disk. This 3D image captures an energetic flare that was detected on April 11, 2017, by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope. The recovered 3D structure gives us a first glimpse into these enigmatic eruptions, displaying bright features that are located about 75 million kilometres (or half the distance between Earth and the Sun) from the centre of the black hole.

Computational imaging establishes a bridge between things happening in distant space and time and the kind of things that we humans can see and are accustomed to analysing. In this sense, such images are in fact both a creation and a discovery, and they allow us to begin to grasp how important that kind of approach is to learning about our universe.

This video trailer is for a hypothetical exhibition about Black Holes. The Bath based graphic designer Harvetica, takes inspiration from the warping of spacetime caused by massive objects

In celestial deeps, see a neutron star rotate,
A once blooming sun, now whispers of its fate.  
The Crab Nebula: a ghost of an exploded star
Seeing some 6,500 years in the past from afar

Fingers on the pulsar, the nebulous drivetrain,
Drenches its surroundings with interstellar rain.
Amidst the swirling mists the stardust shreds,  
Thirty times each second, the make-up of life it sheds.

The heartbeat of the Crab, ringed disk tightly drawn,  
Ejects twin jets, where matter is reborn.
Leap from the pulsar's energetic plume, 
A recycler of the cosmos is in full bloom.

Imagine a fire engine speeds passed you, sirens ablaze.
The pitch of the sound changes. A higher pitch as it races towards you. Lower as it moves away from you. This is the Doppler Effect. Any moving object producing a wave will create this phenomenon. At low speeds we can experience the Doppler shift of sound. 

But if the wave is moving faster, in the case of light, this effect is only perceived when objects are travelling galactically fast. If a galaxy was travelling towards us, its light would be compressed towards the blue end of the spectrum (blue shift). 

More commonly observed however is red shift. The white light of galaxies is stretched to the red end of the visible spectrum as they speed away from us, the viewer. The faster they are travelling, the further away they are and the more red they appear. 

Have a look at the James Webb Space Telescope Deep Field image behind this Red Shift sculpture. Which galaxies do you thing are in the foreground, and which ones are in the background?

Hypothetically, what do you think you would look like if you were behind a black hole? What would happen to the light reflected by your skin as it passes the massive object. We can model such gravitational lensing in the lab using smartphone apps or in this case glass lenses. 

This grotesque self-portrait is reminiscent of a Francis Bacon painting on first glance but is we look deeper we can see the distortion and magnification that could be caused by a large gravitational field.

Welcome to the Art of Astrophysics virtual exhibition. An exciting collaboration between The MoSAIC and Dr Sebastian von Hausegger from the University of Oxford. Explore our exoplanet landscape and see our universe from a new perspective through visual art and poetry.

Realities of the unknown, 
Scoured by ice and fire.
Molten rain descending. 
Arid plain obsidian bound,
Above the jagged peaks, 
A blazing ominous sky,
Risen dark resounding,
Screaming realities unknown.

Original: Oil on canvas (National Gallery London)
Public domain

Rousseau never left France in his entire life, but created beautiful tropical landscapes based on his regular visits to the Botanical Gardens in Paris. Rousseau’s work is able to transport us to far away lands. We must now do the same to imagine distant planets. 

We start our focus on cosmic poetry with this lyrical excerpt from Cosmos (Space + Time).

Dr Sthabile Kolwa is an astrophysicist and musician. They create lyrics inspired by their astronomy research, and in doing so highlight the importance of creativity in innovating new methods of studying the physics of galaxies. The instrumental version of this track can be heard in the background in this section of the exhibition.


Performed by: Senanga Kuti
Written by: Sthabile Kolwa
Produced by: Fabian Pichler

℗ Synchrotron Music
Courtesy of Dr Sthabile Kolwa

We have taken a 160,000km² patch of the Moon's far side surface and used it as inspiration for our exoplanet gallery. Unlike the Earth's moon, on our imaginary exoplanet liquid water fills ancient craters. Notice the dark patches on the Moon's near side. Craters on the side facing Earth have been filled by ancient lava flows creating basalt plains visible from Earth. The far side however is much more pitted with impact craters.

This 400km x 400km section of the farside of the Moon has served as inspiration for our exoplanet surface in this exhibition.

 Data Credit : NASA/Goddard

In this piece, the iconic imagery of the crucifixion is juxtaposed with the Einstein Cross – general relativity revealed through the phenomenon of a gravitationally lensed quasar. 

This results in a quadruple image, inspiring this modernised crucifix image. The phenomenon of gravitational lensing inspired this painting by which calls us to question the faith we put into scientific theory and compelling us to be prepared to update our own understanding when new evidence is provided. 

Sorry Newton!

This artwork is being used to facilitate the teaching of astrophysics research to secondary school children in the UK and the sale of the prints of the study for this sculpture on Lawrence's website helps to subsidise this work.

This image captures the incredible phenomenon known as the "Einstein Cross," revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Through the lens of the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera, we see a distant quasar, about 8 billion light-years away, appearing four times around a closer galaxy, only 400 million light-years from us. This galaxy's gravity bends the quasar's light, creating this unique pattern.

Gravitational lensing, shown here, happens when light from a faraway source is bent by a massive object in its path. This bending can make multiple images of the distant object. In this image, the bright spots are the quasar's images, and the fuzzy centre is the nearby galaxy.

This image isn't just beautiful; it's a tool for discovery. By studying these images, scientists can "weigh" the galaxy and measure important cosmic distances. This helps us understand the universe's size and age. The Einstein Cross is not only a visual wonder but also a gateway to the secrets of the cosmos.

In this piece, the iconic imagery of the crucifixion is juxtaposed with the Einstein Cross – general relativity revealed through the phenomenon of a gravitationally lensed quasar. 

This results in a quadruple image, inspiring this modernised crucifix image. The phenomenon of gravitational lensing inspired this painting by which calls us to question the faith we put into scientific theory and compelling us to be prepared to update our own understanding when new evidence is provided. 

Sorry Newton!

This artwork is being used to facilitate the teaching of astrophysics research to secondary school children in the UK and the sale of the prints on Lawrence's website helps to subsidise this work.

An easy way to distinguish Hubble images from James Webb's. The shape of the diffraction spikes.

Have you ever noticed that bright stars in your favourite space images have unique spikes around them? These are known as diffraction spikes. Diffraction spikes are patterns produced as light bends around the sharp edges of a telescope. While all stars can create these patterns, we only see spikes with the brightest stars when a telescope takes an image. For most reflecting telescopes, including Webb, diffraction spikes appear when light interacts with the primary mirror and struts that support the secondary mirror.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

The cross shape visible on bright objects (such as stars) in Hubble images is a form of distortion that is visible in all telescopes that use a mirror rather than a lens to focus light rays. The crosses, known as diffraction spikes, are caused by the light’s path being disturbed slightly as it passes by the cross-shaped struts that support the telescope’s secondary mirror.

It is only noticeable for bright objects where a lot of light is concentrated on one spot, such as stars. Darker, more spread-out objects like nebulae or galaxies do not show visible levels of this distortion.

ESA/Hubble

Two oxygen atoms combined with a double covalent bond. Simple but fundamental to life.

Two oxygen atoms combined with a double covalent bond. Simple but fundamental to life.

Throughout the history of science, revolutionary instruments propel our understanding with their landmark discoveries. The Hubble Space Telescope is a testament to that concept. Its design, technology and serviceability have made it one of NASA's most transformative observatories. From determining the atmospheric composition of planets around other stars to discovering dark energy, Hubble has changed humanity's understanding of the universe.

NASA

This artistic impression of the galactic outflows simulated in the fireplace below has serendipitously evoked the image of a DNA double helix. Without the oxygen gas erupted from supernovae explosions life as we know it would not be possible.

Now, in the Milky Way's grand embrace,
We glimpse the majesty of time's slow art,
A spiral etched in the heavens,
Ever evolving, ever becoming,
A whisper of creation in the infinite night.


Digital Painting 
2024

Galactic arms unfurl, vast and serene,
Like ancient rivers finding their course,
They spin, a cosmic pinwheel,
Tracing the arc of existence,
A testament to the universe's quiet patience.


Digital Painting 
2024

Eons stretch, stars ignite, and shadows play,
Gravity's gentle hand moulds chaos,
Drawing tendrils of light,
An intricate lace of stellar threads,
Woven through the tapestry of billions of years.


Digital Painting 
2024

In the cradle of cosmic darkness,
Dust and gas, silent architects,
Collide and coalesce,
Birthing a swirling maelstrom, a nascent spiral,
Under the watchful eye of time's vast expanse.



Digital Painting 
2024

Explosions of supernovae within a galaxy can drive powerful outflows of oxygen gas, which are key to reducing fuel for further star formation and regulate the growth of the galaxy over cosmic time. It is this process that has produced the oxygen needed to sustain life on Earth.

Here we contrast these huge, violent outflows on galactic timescales with the peacefulness of a crackling fireplace. These cosmic explosions take place over tens of million years but have similar fluid dynamics to the plasma of fire on a much smaller scale and much quicker time period.

As you listen to the crackle of the fireplace, try to comprehend this difference in scale.

Rey, Katz, Cameron et al. (2023) 

Born from the rubble of a violent collision, hurled through space for millions of years and dismembered by the gravity of planets, asteroid Bennu had a tough life in a rough neighborhood: the early solar system. 

The OSIRIS-Rex mission launched toward Bennu in late 2016, arrived at the asteroid in 2018, and returned a sample of Bennu's surface to Earth in 2023. 

Bennu's experiences will tell us more about where our solar system came from and how it evolved. Like the detectives in a crime show episode, NASA will examine bits of evidence from Bennu to understand more completely the story of the solar system, which is ultimately the story of our origin.

Fun fact: Sir Brian May, the legendary guitarist from the band Queen, along with colleague Dr Claudia Manzoni, played a crucial role in determining the landing site for the OSIRIS-REx mission on Bennu's surface.

This is a simulation to predict the evolution of a typical disc galaxy like our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Watch as billions of years are condensed into one minute and slowly see the characteristic spiral shape form before your eyes. This simulation was the inspiration for the abstract works by Gaz Lawrence displayed alongside it, taking snapshots of different time points throughout the galaxies evolution.

In physics and astronomy, an N-body simulation is a way to model how a group of particles, like stars or planets, move and interact with each other. These particles usually affect each other through forces like gravity. Scientists use N-body simulations to study everything from how the Earth, Moon, and Sun move together, to how the entire universe evolves over time. 

In cosmology, which is the study of the universe, these simulations help us understand how things like galaxy clusters and dark matter influence the formation of structures in space. They also help us learn how star clusters change and develop over time. Galactic collisions will also have a role to play in the final shape of the Milky Way we predict today.

The constellations are far from us and far from static too. 
Wherever you stand, or stood or could ever possibly stand in the cosmic year they will never be the same again. 

You... are... at...:

The exact place in time and space where the Plough can harrow the dusk-time dirt.
The exact place in time and space where the Great Bear can prowl the northern nights.
The exact place in time and space where the Big Dipper can ladle a soup of stars.

Permanence is just a fleeting glimpse of the celestial sphere,
In our future skies I wonder which animals or tools will begin to appear.

Art allows us to change our perspective of the world around us. This sculpture of the constellation Orion shows us new ways of seeing our constellations as dynamic structures that change over time and as we move through space. 

Dr von Hausegger explains: "We’re used to looking at flat maps of Earth and of the sky, but while we’re used to walking through the streets, so can maybe transform from the 2D map to the 3D world, we’re not used to moving through our galaxy. "

Trying moving through the sculpture and see what shapes you can create from different viewpoints. 

Notice the slight colour variation of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse (commonly pronounced beetle juice) at the top left hand corner of Orion. It's name derived from the Arabic for 'Giant's shoulder'. This difference in colour is visible to the naked eye. Try to spot it next time you have a clear northern sky.