ERIS: World’s first realistic sim of the creation of a Spiral Galaxy

The University of Zurich partnered up with the University of California at Santa Cruz to run an impressive simulation of the creation of the universe, and visualized the result in this impressive movie now on YouTube.

For almost 20 years astrophysicists have been trying to recreate the formation of spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way realistically. Now astrophysicists from the University of Zurich present the world’s first realistic simulation of the formation of our home galaxy together with astronomers from the University of California at Santa Cruz. The new results were partly calculated on the computer of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) and show, for instance, that there has to be stars on the outer edge of the Milky Way.

Unfortunately, the video is only on YouTube in 360p.

via ERIS: World’s first realistic simulation of the formation of the Milky Way – YouTube.

Update 8/1: title changed for accuracy.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .