So…this video is a comprehensive overview of supercomputer data formulated to simulate cosmological volumes, galaxy morphology (formation/creation), dark matter, and more, achieved by Mark Vogelsberger of MIT and the entire team of brilliance at The Illustris Collaboration.
From the website:
The Illustris project is a large cosmological simulation of galaxy formation, completed in late 2013, using a state of the art numerical code and a comprehensive physical model. Building on several years of effort by members of the collaboration, the Illustris simulation represents an unprecedented combination of high resolution, total volume, and physical fidelity. The About page contains detailed descriptions of the project, for both the general public and researchers in the field.
On this website we present the scientific motivation behind the project, a list of the collaboration members, key results and references, movies and images created from the simulation data, information on upcoming public data access, and tools for interactive data exploration. The short video below is a compilation made from some of the movies available on the Media page.
—The Illustris Collaboration
I really like this team…
…and you should all check out their website, because this is how you communicate science to the masses:
"The Illustris simulation is the most ambitious computer simulation of our Universe yet performed. The calculation tracks the expansion of the universe, the gravitational pull of matter onto itself, the motion of cosmic gas, as well as the formation of stars and black holes. These physical components and processes are all modeled starting from initial conditions resembling the very young universe 300,000 years after the Big Bang and until the present day, spanning over 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. The simulated volume contains tens of thousands of galaxies captured in high-detail, covering a wide range of masses, rates of star formation, shapes, sizes, and with properties that agree well with the galaxy population observed in the real universe. The simulations were run on supercomputers in France, Germany, and the US. The largest was run on 8,192 compute cores, and took 19 million CPU hours. A single state-of-the-art desktop computer would require more than 2000 years to perform this calculation."
— Mark Vogelsberger
I don’t need to elaborate, because they did a fantastic job communicating their research, putting your in touch with the people and partners involved, links to their press publications, raw data access for schools/organizations, virtually interactive data explorers regarding cosmological structure, galaxy categorization/observation, and media/video/data visualizations such as the beautiful images below!
Illustris simulation overview poster. Shows the large scale dark matter and gas density fields in projection (top/bottom). The lower three panels show gas temperature, entropy, and velocity at the same scale. Centered on the most massive cluster, for which the circular insets show four predicted observables. The two galaxy insets highlight a central elliptical and a spiral disk satelitte (top/bottom). [view larger]
Hubble eXtreme Deep Field observations (2.8 arcmin on a side) in B, Z, H bands convolved with Gaussian point-spread functions of sigma = 0.04, 0.08, and 0.16 arcsec, respectively. Divided down the middle: real observation (left side) and mock observation from Illustris (right side). [view larger]
The Illustris Simulation and above data, quotes, via The Illustris Collaboration