Padi Boyd's Featured Image

What Is This Image?

Padi has chosen a fractal as her featured image. "Fractals indicate to me that for some systems, very nearby initial conditions can lead to dramatically different final states. Many systems in astronomy are nonlinear and may be found to have unpredictable behavior. Fractals remind me that sometimes the more complicated solutions are closer to the actual behavior of a system than the more simple models we sometimes invoke."