Nature rarely presents tidy, manageable figures. Take the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy or the hundreds of thousands of individual atoms in a single virus. Scientists endeavor to describe all the properties and behaviors of every component within these complex assemblages.
That is why supercomputers are revolutionizing our understanding of complex physical systems. Simulations running for days on room-size machines have given visual form to the previously unimaginable, from boundless cosmic realms to the infinitesimal constituents of matter. Such simulations are more than intellectual amusements. They are helping researchers study how drugs work against the swine flu virus and how space and time warp around colliding black holes. Here, then, is a look at supercomputer-generated visualizations, to better see the secrets and beauty of our world.
This image shows a supercomputer simulation run at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, which revealed that double stars with relatively low masses might have formed very early in cosmic history, just 200 million years after the Big Bang. (Prior simulations of the primordial universe had suggested that the first stars were mostly lone giants, up to 300 times as massive as our sun.)
The simulation contains 8*10^52 cubic miles of gas- and dark matter-strewn space. Lighter colors represent higher densities, marking the locations of two developing low-mass stars.