NASA Computer Model Shows A Disk Galaxy's Life History

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI9-Xwj2FXo

 

This cosmological simulation follows the development of a single disk galaxy over about 13.5 billion years, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present time. Colors indicate old stars (red), young stars (white and bright blue) and the distribution of gas density (pale blue); the view is 300,000 light-years across. The simulation ran on the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and required about 1 million CPU hours. It assumes a universe dominated by dark energy and dark matter. Credit: F. Governato and T. Quinn (Univ. of Washington), A. Brooks (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison), and J. Wadsley (McMaster Univ.).

 

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http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/...

 

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Watch this: NASA simulates 13.5 billion years of a galaxy's evolution in two-minute video

 

To simulate 13.5 billion years in the life of a single disk galaxy, NASA needed more than your average desktop PC. The memorable video below is the direct work of the agency's Pleiades supercomputer and, by NASA's estimates, approximately 1 million CPU hours. The resulting 2:17 clip is nothing short of captivating, beginning shortly after the Big Bang and running through present day. It wouldn't be a disk galaxy without an abundance of stars, and each of the colors in the simulation represents something different: red depicts older stars while white and bright blue correspond to new ones — the paler blue shade accounts for distribution of gas density.