Muons penetrate much further than X-rays, they do essentially zero damage, and they are provided for free by the cosmos.
Image credit: Science Source/Digital Globe.
The Galaxy Garden in Paleaku Peace Gardens Sanctuary, Kona, HI, allows visitors to take a walking tour of our galaxy.
The lush south side of Hawaii Island’s Mauna Loa volcano is home to the Galaxy Garden, where visitors can stroll through a living model of the Milky Way at 1,000 light years per foot.
Artist and garden designer Jon Lomberg spent much of his life translating scientific discoveries into visualizations that inform and engage. His rich career in science illustration includes work for Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, and his paintings have a way of bringing us to perspectives light years from our plot of Earth.
However, we cannot walk around in a painting, so Lomberg envisioned a way to create an environment where people could explore our galaxy from any angle they choose, to physically move around it and marvel at its vastness.
Although other walk-through models of the Milky Way exist, Lomberg’s vision is the first that is composed of living plants, a nod to the growing, evolving, and dying properties of stars and star systems. In the garden, plants symbolize stellar features. Hibiscus and vincas flowers represent nebulae, dracaena and red bromeliad plants represent globular clusters, and spotted-leaf gold dust croton plants suggest star fields. The red and black lava cinder making walking trails between the galaxy arms symbolizes a mix of red dwarves, interstellar dust, and burnt out stars.
Our solar system is, of course, indicated, as are the positions of familiar celestial landmarks, such as Polaris, M13, and the Orion nebula. Near the center of the Galaxy Garden are features representing the place where the galaxy arms form a bar. People are invited to sit on a bench and ponder the black hole at the center in the form of a water fountain, with features symbolizing an accretion disk, a gravity well, an event horizon, and a jet.
The Galaxy Garden is located among other themed gardens, many with philosophical or religious meanings, in the Paleaku Peace Garden Sanctuary, Hawaii.
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