Pictures/movies accompanying the press release of the MPG: (in deutsch)

Supercomputer simulations probe the formation of galaxies and quasars in the universe

An international team of astrophysicists led by researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics presents the worldwide largest simulation of the growth of cosmic structure, including a detailed model for the formation of galaxies and supermassive black holes.

Original publication

Simulations of the formation, evolution and clustering of galaxies and quasars

Volker Springel, Simon D. M. White, Adrian Jenkins, Carlos S. Frenk, Naoki Yoshida, Liang Gao, Julio Navarro, Robert Thacker, Darren Croton, John Helly, John A. Peacock, Shaun Cole, Peter Thomas, Hugh Couchman, August Evrard, Joerg Colberg & Frazer Pearce

Nature, 2 June 2005

Visualizations


This movie shows the dark matter distribution in the universe at the present time, based on the Millennium Simulation, the largest N-body simulation carried out thus far (more than 10¹⁰ particles). By zooming in on a massive cluster of galaxies, the movie highlights the morphology of the structure on different scales, and the large dynamic range of the simulation (10⁵ per dimension in 3D). The zoom extends from scales of several Gpc down to resolved substructures as small as ~10 kpc.		High Quality [divx5, 48.6 MB, 1024x768] Medium Quality [divx5, 13.4 MB, 640x480] Low Quality [divx5, 10.8 MB, 512x384] The video data is compressed using divx5 (MPEG4) and has fairly high resolution, such that a fast PC and a good graphics card are required to play them properly. To this end, you can use the 'mplayer' program under Linux. On a Mac, 'quicktime' should work once the divx-codec is installed, available free of charge here. Likewise for `windows mediaplayer'.


A 3-dimensional visualization of the Millennium Simulation. The movie shows a journey through the simulated universe. On the way, we visit a rich cluster of galaxies and fly around it. During the two minutes of the movie, we travel a distance for which light would need more than 2.4 billion years.		Fast flight [divx5, 60 MB, 1024x768] Slow flight [divx5, 120 MB, 1024x768] Credit: Springel et al. (2005)

The top row of these pictures shows the galaxy distribution in the simulation, both on very large scales, and for a rich cluster of galaxies where one can see them individually. The top right panel hence represents the large-scale light distribution in the Universe. For comparison, the images in the lower row give the corresponding dark matter distributions. Click to enlarge the images.

The poster shows a projected density field for a 15 Mpc/h thick slice of the redshift z=0 output. The overlaid panels zoom in by factors of 4 in each case, enlarging the regions indicated by the white squares. Yardsticks are included as well.

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[poster.ps.gz, A0, 280 MB]

The following slices through the density field are all 15 Mpc/h thick. For each redshift, we show three panels. Subsequent panels zoom in by a factor of four with respect to the previous ones. Redshift z=0 (t = 13.6 Gyr)
[1024x768] [2048x1536] [plain]	[1024x768] [2048x1536] [plain]	[1024x768] [2048x1536] [plain]
Redshift z=1.4 (t = 4.7 Gyr)
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Redshift z=5.7 (t = 1.0 Gyr)
[1024x768] [2048x1536] [plain]	[1024x768] [2048x1536] [plain]	[1024x768] [2048x1536] [plain]
Redshift z=18.3 (t = 0.21 Gyr)
[1024x768] [2048x1536] [plain]	[1024x768] [2048x1536] [plain]	[1024x768] [2048x1536] [plain]

Last modified: May, 2005 volker@mpa-garching.mpg.de