Dark Scottie
Dark Scottie is a fridge magnet that's designed to show the relative makeup of our universe. It appeared in issue #12-2023 of The Phrantone.
I was inspired to create Dark Scottie by Neil deGrasse Tyson's writing about astrophysics. According to scientific observations first made possible by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998, most of the universe (95%) is unaccounted for!
I am neither an astronomer nor a physicist. My intention here is to do the work of the artist, which is to draw a frame around the world. For further reading on the science behind dark energy and dark matter, I invite you to check out NASA's explanatory piece on the topic.
My original concept for this visualization is above. The Scottie Dog reference was a little less obvious, though, plus it didn't have the proportional font sizes. The 5%-as-tail idea hadn't arisen yet, either.
It was based on the simple distribution of 100 squares that I'd laid out below to help get my head around the relative proportions.
