The dark matter visualisation in this video is used with the permission of Volker Springel
Galaxy data is from the Millennium Run with thanks to Carlos Frenk, Carlton Baugh,Richard Bower and Cedric Lacey
Movies made by Joel Snape and Andrew Moore

Millennium Flythrough

Fade

A flythrough of the millenium simulation. Starting with galaxies, the movie fades to show the dark matter and then back to the galaxies while flying round a central cluster of galaxies. Two sets are available, one with fake galaxies generated by Daniel Farrow, the other with images from the SDSS matched to predicted galaxy positions.

Fade Fade artistic Fade fake galaxies

Fade (HD)

Combined

A 3-dimensional visualization of the Millennium Simulation. The movie shows a journey through the simulated universe. On the way, we visit a rich cluster of galaxies and fly around it. During the two minutes of the movie, we travel a distance for which light would need more than 2.4 billion years. The left pane of the video shows the galaxies, the right hand side the underlying dark matter.

Combined Combined_artistic Combined_fake

Combined (HD)

Standalone

Standalone Artistic fake galaxies

Stills

Exploring Dark Matter

A 3-dimensional visualization of the Millennium Simulation. The movie shows a journey through the simulated universe. On the way, the galaxies fade to show the dark matter underpinning their formation.

Exploring dark matter Stills [2Gb]

Flythrough

This movie shows a journey down an extract (a 30x30x500Mpc cuboid) of the millenium simulation, showing galaxies from Sloan mapped onto the simlated galaxy positions.

Flythrough Stills [779Mb]

Circuit Fade

This movie is a flythrough of a 50Mpc cube taken from the millenium simulation. Midway through the movie fades to show the dark matter: clusters and filaments can be seen.

Fade Stills [1.8Gb]

Circuit Standalone

These two movies have the same flight path and volume as the "Circuit Fade" above, but stay showing either galaxies or dark matter particles.

Galaxy Flythrough Dark Matter Flythrough Galaxy Stills [450Mb]Dark Matter Stills [2.9Gb]

Methodology

The movies on this page are generated from data output from the millenium galaxy formation simulation. Galaxy images from the Sloan digital sky survey, stripe 82, (SDSS) were then matched to the simulated positions on the basis of colour, brightness and size. The Sloan images were limited to galaxies with a redshift of less than 0.03 to ensure a high enough resolution. This however biased the apparent colour of the movies, so 173 red galaxy images were matched to the most red galaxies, usually the top 2%. In order to increase visual interest, spiral galaxy images from the HST were added to about 150 random galaxies along the flight path, these movies are titled "artistic".

Movies marked "fake" were produced using galaxy images generated by Daniel Farrow which were again matched to the simulated positions.

All movies were made with Partiview. Code for generating the datasets can be found in the data[100Gb] file. High quality versions (as encoded from the stills) are available, but have very large file sizes.

This was a summer project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation and Ogden Trust. The work was started by Andrew Moore and completed by Joel Snape over the summer of 2011 under the supervision of Mark Swinbank

Millennium Movies