Simulated Animation of Galactic Birth

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Milky Way's dark matter modelled in best detail yet

Our galaxy could be surrounded by a vast swarm of invisible companions. These giant clouds of dark matter – representing the failed seeds of galaxy formation – may be detected with a telescope to be launched next year.
Dark matter makes up about 82% of all the matter in the universe, although nobody knows what it actually is. Small clouds of the stuff are thought to have coalesced after the big bang, and then gradually merged together. When enough dark matter is gathered into a huge "halo", it attracts ordinary gas to form stars, and so becomes a galaxy.
Now, scientists led by Jürg Diemand of the University of California in Santa Cruz, US, have modelled this process in more detail than ever before, following the fate of more than 200 million cloudlets as they come together into a halo about the same size as that of our Milky Way.
Such a detailed simulation requires a lot of computing power. "It's at the limit of what current supercomputers can do," Diemand told New Scientist.

The result is a fascinating animation of galactic birth (4.6 MB MPEG version).

Missing galaxies

It shows there should be at least 10,000 separate "subhaloes" of dark matter within the overall galactic halo, each at least a few thousand light years across. And a fair number of these galactic seeds should have germinated. About 120 clumps are large enough...............




The large bright glow in this simulation
represents the colossal halo of dark
matter surrounding the Milky Way as
it was about 3.4 billion years ago.
Smaller clumps of dark matter are
also visible because they do not merge
into larger structures. Curiously, many
of these small clumps do not seed
dwarf galaxies. The image shows a
region of space about 2.6 million
light years across (Illustration: J
Diemand/M Kuhlen/P Madau/UCSC)

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DublinEvents

Wow. Pretty cool simulation. Don't you just envy these scientists having fun with their supercomputers?