Computational Planet, Star and Galaxy Formation

星系变化如此之慢，以至于它们以冻结的美丽星云的形式出现在天空中，被数十亿颗恒星照亮。计算机模拟使天文学家能够在他们眼前看到它们进化的梦想。当速度加快，数百万年后的瞬间，星系是动态的地方，旋转的漩涡中恒星不断诞生和爆炸性死亡。*我们现在可以人为地产生微妙的螺旋图案的闪闪发光的气体、尘埃和恒星，与附近的天空中的那些没有什么区别。挑战是将事情推向极端：在星系相互碰撞时对它们进行建模，创造新恒星的巨大爆发，并将物质驱动到超大质量黑洞中，数百万颗恒星的质量潜伏在天空中几乎每个星系的中间。这种合并在早期宇宙中很常见，当时的星系要猛烈得多，更像是风暴肆虐的云层，而不是螺旋盘，气体、尘埃和辐射的饱和水平远远高于我们银河系今天所经历的水平。了解这段激烈的过去将有助于我们理解今天我们周围的宇宙，这些宇宙中的恒星和元素大多是在数十亿年前形成的。*这也是我们的未来：10亿年后，我们的银河系将以疯狂的方式环绕着仙女座星系，最终将摧毁它们美丽的圆盘，就像我们遥远的后代看着不受老化太阳系影响的那样。令人惊讶的是，在这个过程中，任何恒星都不太可能发生物理碰撞。然而，它将产生大量新的恒星形成，消耗两个星系的气体，并在遥远的未来把我们留在一个巨大的椭圆星系内。我们的研究将辐射、气体和尘埃联系在一起；行星、恒星和星系。所有这些都是相互依存的，并影响着其他人。超级计算机是让我们研究这些过程的工具，这些过程太慢、太难，无法用其他任何方法来研究。挑战是利用令人惊叹的新仪器来观察从附近的恒星和行星形成的气体(智利的阿塔卡马大毫米阵列)到早期星系的尘埃和光线(即将到来的30米望远镜和詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜)，产生天文学家在天空中看到的多样性。

Galaxies change so slowly that they appear fixed on the sky in the form of frozen beautiful nebulae lit by billions of stars. Computer simulations enable the astronomer's dream of seeing them 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 galaxies with delicate spiral patterns of sparkling gas, dust and stars indistinguishable from 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 with the mass of millions of stars 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. Understanding this violent past will help us understand the universe around us today, whose stars and very elements were mostly made billions of years earlier.******This is also our future: in a billion years our Milky Way will wrap itself around the Andromeda galaxy in a frenzy that will ultimately destroy their beautiful disks as our distant descendants watch unscathed from an aging solar sytem. Amazingly, it is quite unlikely any stars will physically collide in this process. It will however, spawn rafts of new star formation, consuming the gas of both galaxies and leaving us inside a single, great elliptical galaxy in the distant future.******Our research links together radiation, gas and dust; planets, stars and galaxies. All of them are interdependent and affect the others. Supercomputers are the tool that lets us study these processes that are too slow and too difficult to study any other way. The challenge is to produce the diversity that astronomers see on the sky using amazing new instruments tuned to see everything from nearby star and planet forming gas (The Atacama Large Millimetre Array in Chile) to dust and light from early galaxies (the upcoming Thirty Meter Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope).