NASA patch.
Nov. 19, 2013
In their quest to understand the origins of stars and galaxies in our universe, astrophysicists use supercomputers to model extremely complex phenomena on an immense scale. Massive stars 10-100 times more massive than our sun, are central to the key phenomena that shape the universe, but the processes involved in their formation remain elusive. To investigate these processes, University of California-Berkeley researchers perform large-scale supercomputing simulations of massive stars forming from the collapse of giant, turbulent molecular clouds.
In this image, a simulation shows the gas filaments that formed in an infrared dark cloud 800,000 years after the region began gravitational collapse. The extent of the main filament is about 4.5 parsecs in length. In the highest density fragments in the filament (red), molecular cloud cores are developing and will collapse further until they form stars.
Pleiades Supercomputer - NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility (NAS)
Related: NASA will showcase more than 30 of the agency's exciting computational achievements at SC13, the international supercomputing conference, Nov. 17-22, 2013 in Denver: http://www.nasa.gov/ames/nasa-experts-showcase-science-technology-at-supercomputing-conference/
NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility: http://www.nas.nasa.gov/
Images, Text, Credit: Richard Klein, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Pak Shing Li, University of California, Berkeley; Tim Sandstrom, NASA Ames Research Center.
Cheers, Orbiter.ch
