Galaxy Simulator

What is this all about?

- The Goal of this complete project is to simulate galaxies. So the obvious two steps are: 1. Generating - point clouds and 2. simulating the pointclouds that we generated.

This all started when Tim Tugendhat invited me to Heidelberg to help visualize the NFW-function. - After we made som visualizations, we started generating our own clusters using the - Navarro Frenk White - profile. That was so much fun that I quickly started generating more and more stars and optimized - the complete process. -

- I then started to think about stuff to do with the millions of stars I generated and realized that - Simulating the clusters would be a very hard, but informative task to learn new skills. -

Generating the pointclouds

- In the aftermath, generating the pointclouds was one of the easier parts of the project. - A detailed summary on how the stars are generated can be found in the - writeup. -

- The process short version can be explained in the following way: Create a star, test if it should be kept - or not, keep it if yes and repeat the process if not. The Process is repeated few thousand times and in the - end, a clusted of objects apears on the screen. - The Navarro Frenk White - profile is used to determine what star is kept and what star is discarded. -

- Using this technique, a lot of stars can be generated, and because of all the computations running - independently, this whole process scales very well. After containerizing the software generating random - stars and sorting "bad ones" out, it can be thrown onto a cluster of computers who generate stars 24/7 -