2015: Visualize the Universe

Description

Cosmological simulations are a cornerstone of our understanding of the universe throughout Its 13.7 billion year progression from small fluctuations observed in the cosmic microwave background to today, when galaxies and clusters of galaxies surround us, interconnected by a vast cosmic web. Simulations of the formation of structure in the Universe typically simulate dark matter, a collisionless fluid, as a discretized set of particles that interact only gravitationally. Ensuring adequate mass resolution within a simulation requires a large number of particles -- typically on the scale of 1024^3, 2048^3, or even 10240^3 particles in the largest simulations. Developing visualizations for these particles, and perhaps more challengingly for the structures that they form through gravitational interaction and collapse, requires first identifying the structures, developing spatial or informatics representations of the components or the structures themselves, and then correlating these visualizations across time steps.

Date

2015

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