"Computational Planet, Star and Galaxy Formation: Bridging the Scales"

计算机模拟使天文学家能够看到星系的梦想，这些星系变化得如此缓慢，它们以美丽但静态的星云的形式固定在天空中，被数十亿颗恒星照亮，在他们眼前演化。当加速到几百万年的瞬间过去时，星系是动态的地方，是恒星不断诞生和爆炸性死亡的漩涡。现在，我们可以人工生成盘状星系，这些盘状星系具有精致的螺旋图案，由闪闪发光的气体、尘埃和恒星组成，几乎与附近天空中的星系完全相同。面临的挑战是将事情推向极端：对星系进行建模，因为它们粉碎在一起并产生巨大的新恒星爆发，并将物质驱动到超大质量黑洞中，黑洞本身的大小相当于潜伏在天空中几乎每个星系中间的小星系。这些合并在早期宇宙中很常见，当时星系是更加暴力的地方，更像是风暴破坏的云而不是螺旋盘，并且充满了远远高于我们今天银河系所经历的气体、尘埃和辐射水平。

Computer simulations enable the astronomer's dream of seeing galaxies, that change so slowly they appear fixed on the sky in the form of beautiful but static nebulae lit by billions of stars, to evolve before their very eyes. When sped up so that millions of years pass in moments galaxies are dynamic places, swirling vortices where stars are constantly being born and explosively dying. We can now artificially generate disk galaxies with delicate spiral patterns of sparkling gas, dust and stars almost identical to those nearby in the sky. The challenge is to take things to the extreme: to model galaxies as they smash together and create giant bursts of new stars and drive material into super-massive black holes themselves the size of small galaxies lurking in the middle of nearly every galaxy in the sky. These mergers are commonplace in the early universe when galaxies were far more violent places, more like storm wracked clouds than spiral disks and saturated with levels of gas, dust and radiation far above what our Milky Way Galaxy experiences today.