This video is a first-of-its-kind 3-D simulation. It shows 700,000 years in the life of space, depicting the process that leads to the birth of protostellar clusters. It’s a collaboration between scientists at Lawrence Livermore Labs and the University of California at Berkeley.
The scientists took advantage of the newly upgraded Pleiades supercomputer at NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing facility at Ames Research Center. This baby can now do 6.28 petaflops, or 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. Which, in layman’s terms, means it’s really, really fast.
The fascinating simulation extrapolates its molecular cloud from observations of the Hubble Space Telescope and other orbiting observatories. It shows how gravity causes sections to collapse and form eddies of interstellar gas that then collapse into stellar clusters and cores, ultimately creating individual stars.
The shape of things may be a little surprising—it basically looks like a dust bunny. NASA says, “A key result, supported by observation, is that some star clusters form like pearls in a chain along elongated, dense filaments inside molecular clouds—so-called ‘stellar nurseries.’ ”
