Pretty Astro Movie

People tend to ask me what exactly it is that I *do* when I'm researching. Here is a pretty cosmology simulation. This is how the merger of dark matter halos might look like if the universe was ... a box. And if clumps of matter about the size of 10^10 solar masses were considered "particles."



A smaller, wussier quality version of the movie for the internet-speedily challenged can be found here.

So I take this data and try to extract useful physical insights from the data, trying to test the validity of current cosmological analytic theory with what happens in the simulation.

But my graphs rarely look as pretty as this movie does.

(note: These simulations were performed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications by Andrey Kravtsov (The University of Chicago) and Anatoly Klypin (New Mexico State University). Visualizations by Andrey Kravtsov.)