JHU researcher wins Visualization Challenge

Depicting the interactions of the greater cosmic world, a computer-generated illustration by a Hopkins researcher has won the National Science Foundation's 2011 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge in the "Informational Posters and Graphics" category. Miguel Angel Aragon, an associate research scientist at the Hopkins Department of Physics and Astronomy, based the poster on different views of the structure and dynamics of the Universe.
"Dark matter drives the development of structure in the universe," Aragon said, explaining how the dynamics of the Universe driven by gravity are dominated by dark matter. From top to bottom, the poster spans 240 million light years, with actual images of galaxies used in the far right frame. According to Aragon, dark matter simulations were the basis for the placement of the galaxies in his image. While not actually visible or physically detectable, dark matter is the most abundant matter in the universe.
In creating the poster, titled "The Cosmic Web," Aragon portrayed the way the universe is organized due to dark matter's influence. "The poster shows the structures in the universe, the dynamic structure of the universe and the galaxies, how everything is connected and how everything is related to each other," he said.
Aragon's poster, which he developed in collaboration with colleagues Julieta Aguilera, graphic and interaction designer, and Mark Subbarao, director of visualization of Chicago's Adler Planetarium, was featured on the front cover of the Feb. 3rd edition of the journal Science.  Aragon's research, supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, involves mapping out the universe and improving our understanding of interactions between galaxies. "We are basically doing a Google Maps of the universe, where you have roads that are like filaments that are connected to clusters, which would be like cities," he said.
"We have algorithms that make a network of structures, and then we are using these structures to understand the relation between the cosmic world on very large scales and the galaxies that are inside them."
The images Aragon used for his poster come from material he had prepared for a paper, which he anticipates to submit this week. Supplying the images and the theory behind what he wanted to portray, Aragon relied on Aguilera and Subbarao to bring it altogether in a unifying way for his poster.
The National Science Foundation and Science created the Visualization Challenge nine years ago in an effort to get scientists to better communicate their work to the general public through visuals. Other categories in the Visualization Challenge include videos, interactive games, photography and illustrations.
Honorable mention in the Informational Posters and Graphics category includes a detailed depiction of the Ebola virus and its molecular components, put together by a team of Russian scientists. The People's Choice, new to the competition this year in allowing the public to weigh in on the entries, went to a group from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease who explained the parts, structure and function of a Transmission Electron Microscope.