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Zooming in on inner light-years of a dark matter halo
Zooming in on the inner 30 light-years of a dark matter halo in this visualization taken from the "Renaissance Simulation," a 70-terabyte dataset created on the Blue Waters supercomputer to help scientists understand how the universe evolved during its early years. The rotating gaseous disk breaks apart into three clumps that collapse under their own gravity to form supermassive stars.
[This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (grants PHY 1430152, AST 1514700, AST 1614333, OAC 1835213 and AST 1109243). The simulation was performed on Blue Waters, operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) with PRAC allocation support by NSF awards OAC 0832662, OAC 1238993 and OAC 1514580). The subsequent analysis and the re-simulations were performed with NSF’s XSEDE allocation on the Stampede2 resource. This research is part of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale computing project, which is supported by NSF (awards OAC 0725070 and OAC 1238993) and the state of Illinois. Blue Waters is a joint effort of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its NCSA.]
To learn more about this research, see the Georgia Tech news story Birth of massive black holes in the early universe revealed. (Date image taken: unknown; date originally posted to NSF Multimedia Gallery: Aug. 19, 2019)
Credit: John Wise, Georgia Institute of Technology
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