Power of Data Visualization

There will soon be seven billion people on the planet. By 2045 global population is projected to reach nine billion. Nigel Holmes is a British graphic designer and theorist, imagines how much space we would need to host a world party for 7 billion people in 2011.

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The Orion-theory that the alignment and placement of the pyramids of Giza is widely known, though much discredited.

Whilst reading up on the theory, i came across this, alternate theory to the alignment and layout of the pyramids of the Giza plateau.

Primarily they focused on something much closer than the Orion constellation, rather they set reflect the inner planets of our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

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Using the Discover supercomputer — which is capable of 67 trillion calculations per second — astronomers at NASA Goddard have created a series of images of what our solar system would look like to an alien astronomer at various points in time. Their simulations track the interactions of 75,000 dust grains in the Kuiper Belt, and show that while the planets would be too dim to detect directly, aliens could deduce the presence of Neptune from its effects on the icy region. Strikingly, the images resemble one taken by Hubble of the star Fomalhaut. NASA has put out a cute video to go with the announcement as well.

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We can discover the oddities of space with this nifty info graphic about things you might have not known about outer space.

VY Canis Majoris is a red hypergiant star located in the constellation Canis Major. At between 1800 and 2100 solar radii (approx 2.7 billion km), it is currently the largest known star in terms of relative size to our own sun (although not in terms of mass).

The size is beyond comprehension.

If you Canis replaced our own star, it would engulf everything up until Saturn.

It's width, as compared here, is just short of all the planets to Uranus.

It's BIG!

The following is not a futuristic scenario. It is not science fiction. It is a demonstration of the capabilities of GIS to model the results of an extremely unlikely, yet intellectually fascinating query: What would happen if the earth stopped spinning? ArcGIS was used to perform complex raster analysis and volumetric computations and generate maps that visualize these results.

The potentially hazardous asteroid '(101955) 1999 RQ36' has a one-in-a-thousand chance of impacting the Earth, and more than half of this probability indicates that this could happen in the year 2182, based on a global study in which Spanish researchers have been involved. Knowing this fact may help design in advance mechanisms aimed at deviating the asteroid's path.

This illustration created by Australia's Electro Optic Systems aerospace company shows a view of the Earth from geostationary height depicting swarms of space debris - approximately 50,000 of the half-million or more objects bigger than 1cm - in Low Earth Orbit. An Australian company said that it had developed a laser tracking system that will stop chunks of space debris colliding with spacecraft and satellites in the Earth's orbit. Electric Optic Systems said lasers fired from the ground would locate and track debris as small as ten centimetres (four inches) across, protecting astronauts and satellites. Debris on the eastern side of the image are in the Earth's shadow and so not visible to the eye.