Artist Kysa Johnson works on a scale both incredibly minuscule and astronomically large. Her frenetic drawings celebrate massive cosmic phenomena—nebula, star clouds, neutron stars—that lie thousands of light years away from Earth. Yet Johnson depicts these subjects using patterns made by some of the smallest things in the universe: subatomic particles.
In particle physics, decay looks like this: one particular particle (a so-called “mother particle”) disappears and is replaced by two or more decay particles (also known as “daughter particles”). Those can turn into “granddaughter particles” and so on and so on. As these unstable particles morph into stable ones, they make patterns of movements, almost like a play-by-play diagram you’d see in a basketball game. The “tracks” that these particles make have been recorded by physicists studying the phenomena for decades.
Johnson takes these patterns and layers them to illustrate other natural phenomena: the patterns that star clusters and nebula make in the sky. Her work takes the microscopic and morphs it into the telescopic. See the pieces in the slide show above.