Formation of a whopper 100 solar mass star

This video shows the formation of a massive star -- 100 times the Sun's mass -- from a cold cloud of gas and dust. It's a visualization generated from computer models done by Mark Krumholz at Princeton University. The long view is on the left, and a closeup on the right.

Mark Krumholz webpage: http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~krumholz/

My writeup of this: http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/02/27/small-stars-midwife-to-big-stars/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• astronomy
• stars
• computer
• simulation
• princeton
• phil
• plait
• bad

[PsychoBlack]

How is this done?

Do they look at it for a long time and speed up the changes or something?

[TheBadAstronomer]

It's a simulation. They model the physical conditions inside a cloud using known physics, and solve the equations as time goes on. So they can figure out where the gas is, how it moves, how gravity and pressure affect it, and so on.

[SuperFlyingBrick]

EPIC, proces that takes billion years to complete we see in just a few second...

[FALCO64125]

@fertilizerspike Exactly how big was the ass you pulled that from?

[arthurandroid]

@Zetimenvec There are code samples for CUDA and DirectCompute that can do relativly large n-body simulations in real time on commodity hardware. If you render the simulation offline then you can up the particle count by significantly.

[Phonologie]

That remembers me water movements...

[wowdanalise]

It takes millions of years for a star to form. Apparently we had cameras filming shit back then, i didn't know it but fuck yeah!

[JeffreyOKay]

relatively 'average' blackhole? Wouldn't the black hole be quite a huge one?

[CWSSje]

BY THE WAY GUYS, that was just dry ice on water ^.^ Wbeaty did it too, it takes about half a day to gte the materials if ur unlucky

[Perspektyva]

That cloud is represented by ALLOT of particles and to crunch out an animation like this you'd need to recalculate each particles vector in relation to other particles (bacicaly pointing it towards the center of mass). And you'd have to do this for every frame, the more frames per second the more accurate results you'll get. For a simulation like this you need a a supercomuter and alot of time. However you could run mini sims of 20 or so objects smoothly with some free soft of the web.