Milky Simulator

Team efforts of about 9 months have come to an end in simulating a computer model of the spiral galaxies, which in turn may reflect the answers to our questions about our Milky way galaxy. Milky way was being tried to be simulated for the past many years to reveal the secrets of our galaxy and it's formation. But it was never possible due to the complexity of the way the galaxy's structure. Now it is been made possible by the NASA’s state-of-the-art Pleiades supercomputer and the Cray XT5 "Monte Rosa" at Zurich's Swiss National Supercomputing Center with the help from University of California Santa Cruz, and the Institute For Theoretical Physics, Zurich. This new simulation is proudly called as "Eris".

Javiera Guedes says,"Previous efforts to form a massive disc galaxy like the Milky Way have failed because the simulated galaxies ended up with huge central bulges compared to the size of the disc,” . He also added that the simulation follows the interactions of more than 60 million particles of dark matter and gas. Eris is colored to show gas clouds in red and stars in blue. Even though the Eris looks dimmer when compared to the original Milky way galaxy, it has been simulated to maximum resolution ever done !!

 The picture shows the simulated model on the left side and the original picture of our galaxy on the right side and the difference can be clearly seen though there is no much difference. Source: i09

Most cosmologists favor the cold dark matter theory as a description of how the universe went from a smooth initial state at early times, to the lumpy distribution of galaxies and their clusters we see today. Co-author Piero Madau, of UCSC says, "The simulation shows that the cold dark matter scenario, where dark matter provides the scaffolding for galaxy formation, is able to generate realistic disc-dominated galaxies". The simulations also better reflect the behavior of supernovae where the jet emissions from supernova get blew up into the central parts of the bulge of the galaxy. Thus this simulator lets us know what else is actually to be found about our universe. The calculations used in this simulation are yet to be printed in The Astrophysical Journal.

AUGUST 31, 2011.
Ref: Worldradio & www.i09.com

Pranu :)