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Galaxy Formation and the Development of Large-Scale Structure: Caption
Large Scale Structures
Employing a Convex C220 at Princeton in 1991, Renyue Cen and Jeremiah
Ostriker modelled the interactions of dark matter, baryonic gas, ionization and
radiative cooling in a volume traversing approximately 200 million light
years on each side and containing 128^3 or 2 million zones. The
simulation ran for 250 hours, yielding 10 gigabytes of data. In order to navigate
through all the numbers, the Princeton team shipped their data to NCSA. Here, further
refinement of the calculation on a Convex C240 increased the resolution to
180^3 nearly 6 million zones, after which the data was visualizated
using NCSA's Cosmic Explorer.
The resulting movie portrayed the emergence from cosmic gas of galaxy clusters, bursting forth at first, then slowing,
eventually forming patterns of sheets and voids that resembled the
structures observed on large scales.
Credits
- Research: Renyue Cen, Jeremiah Ostriker; Princeton University
- Visualization: Deyang Song, Michael Norman; NCSA
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NCSA. Last modified, 10/18/95