Early Cosmological Simulations Project: High-Resolution Images

Matt Turk's two advisors, Mike Norman and Tom Abel, driving the display wall at Texas Advanced Computing Center. Triton users have access to similar display capabilities through the OptIPuter at Cal-IT2.

This image shows a set of shells in density, and we look down the top of the collapsing gas cloud. This type of visualization allows us to peer inside the onion layers of the pre-stellar object to see its shape at many different length and density scales. There's gas everywhere in this image, but we highlight regions where the density of that gas is constant. The side length of each panel is 500 times the distance of the earth to the sun, but the entire simulation is of the order of the size of the galaxy!

A zoom-in of simulation SEED008 (one of the above stills) from
Matthew Turk, hosted on Vimeo.

This image shows a distribution of mass in the inner regions of the simulations as a function of density and temperature. By looking at the data in this manner, we can see regions that are shocked, or inflection points in the chemical and thermal evolution of the gas.

This image comes from the Science paper (which calculation was was the inspiration for the Triton calculation). This is also a volume rendering, like the one described above, and the image itself was generated on Triton.