Colliding Galaxies
Simulating and animating a collision of two Galaxies. This GitBook page belongs to this project.
Table of Contents
Introduction
On this site, we will explore a simulation of two colliding galaxies. First of all this simulation was created using Gadget-2. If you want to find out more about the software and libraries used to create everything that is presented here, check out the last page about used software. It comes with links to everything you'll need to recreate the data, graphs and videos provided here.
This whole simulation stuff is new for me. Also, apart from some tutorials and exercises, this is basically my first Python-project. So the code probably won't always be efficient and beautiful. I'm glad it works.
Motivation
Since this simulation was run on a normal laptop, it isn't the most complex one ever created. So why do all that? What questions can be answered by this simulation of two colliding galaxies?
Apart from all the direct data analysis stuff, the most important question is exactly the last one mentioned above: what can be answered? Where are the limits of this simplified version of our universe? We will explore these boundaries in the data analysis section by comparing our extracted data to results from real-world observations.
Also: it's fun to watch two galaxies crashing into each other.
Simulation
Here you can see the final result of the simulation. You can download the video as mp4 or gif.
To be more specific: You can see the 20.000 "disk particles" (corresponding to stars) projected on the xy-plane. What you don't see are the 40.000 "halo particles" (corresponding to dark matter). To be honest the halos are just two big ellipsoids bumping into each other (the rotating disks definitely look more interesting), but they will still be part of our data analysis section, which is coming up next.