The Gravitas Project: Supercomputer Simulations Recast as Art

This is a short video showing simulations of what would happen if you put several identical galaxies together in space and allowed them to collide according to the equations of gravity.  It takes a scientific tool (supercomputer simulations of galaxy collisions) and uses it to create beautiful patterns that are impossible to find in nature.  Astrophysicist John Dubinski is responsible for the simulations, and he works with musician John Kameel Farah to set the images to original music.  

Real galaxy collisions, when multiple galaxies crash together, merging or passing through one another, are some of the most spectacular and seemingly violent events we can see with telescopes.  In one sense they truly are violent, making a surprising and often beautiful mess out of what were once orderly spiral or elliptical collections of stars.  However, not much actually "collides" in a galaxy collision.  Rather, the stars and other materials just get rearranged in reaction to the changing gravitational fields.  The collisions also take place very slowly.  All of the telescope images of galaxy collisions in the universe are essentially static snapshots; we are unable to watch them evolve because of our limited human timescales.

To study the physics of galaxy collisions, we therefore turn to computer simulations.  The basic idea to these simulations is to make three-dimensional numerical models of imaginary galaxies, and then to set them on a collision course.  The computer programs use the mathematical equations describing gravity to figure out how the system will evolve over time.  These simulations are a key part of the scientific effort to better understand how galaxies grew, merged, and interacted over the history of the universe.

The process of "visualizing" the simulations is a secondary step:  the simulation output consists of vast amounts of numerical data, recording the position of every individual "particle" in the simulation at every simulated time.  You can take these simulations and represent them visually, though, and the results are some of the most awe-inspiring movies you will ever see.

Dubinski, recognizing this, has created a series of stunning animations based on his simulations, which you can find here.  While it does not model anything that truly happens in nature, the animation I posted above still teaches some interesting lessons about, as Dubinski puts it, "the emergence of chaos".  It's also  just really pretty.