Eris is a computer simulation of the
Milky Way galaxy's physics.
It was done by astrophysicists from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the
University of Zurich, Switzerland and
University of California, Santa Cruz.
The simulation project was undertaken at the NASA Advanced Supercomputer Division's Pleiades and the
Swiss National Supercomputing Centre
Swiss may refer to:
* the adjectival form of Switzerland
*Swiss people
Places
*Swiss, Missouri
*Swiss, North Carolina
*Swiss, West Virginia
*Swiss, Wisconsin
Other uses
*Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports
*Swiss International A ...
for nearly eight months, which would have otherwise taken 570 years in a
personal computer.
The Eris simulation is the first successful detailed simulation
[ of a Milky Way like galaxy.][ The results of the simulation were announced in August 2011.
]
Background
Simulation projects intending to simulate spiral galaxies have been undertaken for the past 20 years. All of these projects had failed as the simulation results showed central bulges which are huge compared to the disk size.[
]
Simulation
The simulation was undertaken using supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...
s which include the Pleiades supercomputer
Pleiades () is a petascale supercomputer housed at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division, NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at NASA's Ames Research Center located at Moffett Federal Airfield, Moffett Field near Mountain View, Califor ...
, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre
Swiss may refer to:
* the adjectival form of Switzerland
*Swiss people
Places
*Swiss, Missouri
*Swiss, North Carolina
*Swiss, West Virginia
*Swiss, Wisconsin
Other uses
*Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports
*Swiss International A ...
and the supercomputers at the University of California, Santa Cruz.[
It is based on the theory that in the early universe, cold and slow moving dark matter particles clumped together. These dark matter clumps then formed the "scaffolding" around galaxies and galactic clusters. The motions of more than 60 million particles which represented dark matter and galactic gas were simulated for a period of 13 billion years.]
Simulation results
The Eris simulation is the first successful simulation to have resolved the high-density gas clouds where stars formed.[ The simulation result consisted of a galaxy which is very similar to the Milky Way galaxy. Some of the parameters which were similar to Milky Way are stellar content, gas content, kinematic decomposition, brightness profile and the bulge-to-disk ratio.]
References
External links
* {{YouTube, id=VQBzdcFkB7w, title=ERIS: World's first realistic simulation of the formation of the Milky Way
Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Zurich
Cosmological simulation