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Most of the images in the Gallery were created with TIPSY.

Face on view of a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. This simulation took 100,000 CPU hours on the TACC Lonestar cluster to complete.

A very high-resolution simulation of the formation of a dark matter halo in its cosmological context. This simulation has a spatial resolution of a few hundred light years and the mass resolution of a few thousand of solar masses (the size of a small star cluster). It took 100,000 CPU hours on the ARSC Power4 to complete and will allow us to measure the density profile of a galaxy sized dark matter halo with unprecedented detail down to its very center.

A simulation of a protoplanetary disk shows gas giant planets forming in hundreds of years. The color coding is by density and shows about half a dozen planets formed between 8 and 20 AU from a solar-type star. Also see a face on view. The simulation was run on PSC Compaq Alphaserver Cluster. See the article in Science.

Saturn's rings are being simulated as self-gravitating, colliding chunks of ice. 200,000 particles are put down in a small patch and evolved under their own gravity and the shearing tide of Saturn. In green is the original patch, while replicas are shown in magenta. Spiral structure forms on a length scale of about 50 meters. It is hoped that the Cassini mission to Saturn will have enough resolution to detect these features. This simulation was performed on the ARSC Cray T3E.

The Sloan Volume, a 100 Mpc slice of a 1,000 Mpc volume at a redshift of 0 and bias of 1 using CDM initial conditions in a critical density Universe. The color scale represents a factor of 3000 in density. We also have a model with a bias of 2. These models were simulated with 47 million particles on the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center CRAY T3D. The dynamic range of this simulation (at a redshift of 2) can best be seen in this mosaic, where each panel is a magnification by a factor of 2. For a better view of this simulation, we have a VRML and an Inventor description of a 80 Mpc subcube at a redshift of 0 and a bias of 1.4. The colors of the particles represent a factor of 1 million in density.

We also have the the same volume at a redshift of 0.0 in a low density Universe (Omega = 0.3 and bias of 1.0). A model with Omega = 0.4 (bias 1.27) was also run. Compare the structure seen in this mosaic of magnified views with that in the critical density simulation above. These are also 47 million particle simulations run on the Cornell Theory Center IBM SP-2.

A coma size cluster was chosen from the above Omega = 1.0 simulation and resimulated in high resolution, while keeping all the large scale power. This snap shot is 50Mpc across centered on the cluster. This simulation has only 700 thousand particles, but its effective resolution is that of 3 billion particles. A higher resolution simulation resolves this cluster into a thousand subhalos.

This is a cluster of galaxies comparable to Virgo at a redshift of 0.0. The color scale represents 4 orders of magnitude in density starting at the virial density. The box extends to 4 megaparsecs in radius: twice the virial radius. This simulation was run on the ARSC Cray T3D. You may also compare the low resolution CRAY simulation to the high resolution parallel simulation shown to the same scale and at a redshift of 2. There is a VRML version of a moderate resolution simulation of this cluster. An even higher resolution version of this cluster with 10 million particles has been run to a redshift of 4 on the NCSA Origin 2000.

The results of a 3 million particle CDM (Cold Dark Matter) simulation is shown smoothed at 10 Mpc, with overdensities between -0.8 (blue) and 1.4 (red). The simulation produces much higher dynamic range in densities, than can be seen at this smoothing scale. Take a look at the MOVIE of the structure formation in this simulation.

Formation of a quasar host: the result of a high resolution SPH simulation of a region that showed early structure formation in our large cosmological simulation. The abstract of the paper describing this simulation is available. The full paper is available in our ftp-site, in the file pub/hpcc/quaslett.ps.Z .

The Universe as seen by Vincent: perhaps the most famous TIPSY image of the Universe.

Here are some links to images that are important to our project:

COBE maps: initial conditions for simulations of large scale structure are constrained by the power spectrum of fluctuations seen by COBE.


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