I thought that the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a chart that denotes a life cycle of every star from Sirius to the Alpha Centauri is pretty fascinating!

Wondering what will happen to our own Sun when the fusion stops and it explodes into a Red Giant? Will it ever become a Black Hole? Why or why not? This animated interactive experience will answer these questions and, hopefully, make you as obsessed with stellar life cycles as I am.

This project was made in collaboration with the NYU Physics department based on the educational materials of the professor Maryam Modjaz.

The problem

How to easily explain a complex scientific graph? Moreover, how to make a diagram easy to use by non-specialists?

The solution

A data visualization that:

1. facilitates everyday usage of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram as the user can hover over data points to see their temperature and luminosity, and understand which stars fall into which categories. The inspiration was largely drawn from Wolfram Alpha’s graphing interfaces for mathematics and science.
2. shows an animated "story" of high- and low-mass stars that makes it easy to visualize and revise basic information about stars’ lifespans in reference to the diagram.

The process

1. Working through the possibilities of storytelling behind the diagram, i.e. choosing which stars’ lifespans to animate (settled on one example for a low-mass and one example for a high-mass star).
2. Prototyping the interface, deciding to separate diagram usage mode from the learning mode.
3. Getting the data from Strasbourg’s University astrophysics database VizieR, cleaning it, attempting to parse directly into a Processing sketch. Modifying the approach because the dispersion of values was not conducive to showcasing the diagram’s purpose.
4. Choosing the color palette for visualization, appropriate graphics (paralleling the aesthetics of Suprematism), and implementing red visual guides for UX improvements.
5. Implementing the Object-Oriented Java structure with a Star superclass and Red Giants and White Dwarfs classes inheriting from it.
6. Pulling the definitions of terminology from NASA’s Hubblesite Glossary API.
7. Creating Processing-based animation to visualize stars’ metamorphosis.