Astrophysicists from the University of Zurich working with UCSC’s astronomers have created the world’s first realistic simulation of the formation of the Milky Way. It’s amazing that all this clockwork perfection came out of such a galactic Charlie Foxtrot.
The video -— which follows the original announcement of the study — starts less than a million years after the Big Bang. Previous simulations resulted in shapes that weren’t exactly like our home galaxy. This one, created with two supercomputers from NASA and the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, resulted in good match of the real thing.
The results of the calculation has been published in the Astrophysical Journal and support the theory that dark matter’s gravitational forces were key in the formation of the universe. This theory says that the matter that forms stars and planetary systems came into place because of the influence of dark matter’s gravitational wells.
University of Zurich’s scientist Lucio Meyer has a good explanation of how they created it and the implications of their research. [YouTube via La Información via Fogonazos]