I have generated a number of nice structure formation movies from our simulations. On this page these movies are available to download. Feel free to use them in talks and the like. If you see something in one of the movies that raises any questions, or would like any additional information then feel free to email me.

The Overwhelmingly Large Simulations (OWLS) project involved running cosmological simulations of representative volumes of the universe in boxes of size 25 Mpc/h and 100 Mpc/h. This section contains some visualizations of the 25 Mpc/h volume.

These movies correspond to a region with a comoving size of 3Mpc/h. By redshift zero the main object in this volume will become a halo of mass 10¹⁴ M_sun, this movie stops at redshift 2. Click the images for the movies.

Also available with temperature, metallicity and stars (click the images to get the movies):

The final movie of this object contains the four panels available above (density, temperature, metallicity, stars) into one movie and adds a redshift indicator.

A slice through the 25Mpc/h OWLS simulation. The slice is 1Mpc/h thick and the movie runs from a redshift of 20 down to redshift two.

The Overwhelmingly Large Simulations (OWLS) project involved running cosmological simulations of representative volumes of the universe in boxes of size 25 Mpc/h and 100 Mpc/h. This section contains some visualizations of the 100 Mpc/h volume.

This movie shows the formation of a cluster of galaxies down to redshift zero. The two panels show density and metallicity. This movie was encoded using a different encoder than most of the others on this page. If you cannot get it to play you may need to install the XViD codec

This movie is also available as a .mpg file.

A slice through the 100Mpc/h OWLS simulation. The slice is 2Mpc/h thick and the movie runs from a redshift of 20 down to redshift zero.

During my PhD I worked, amongst other things, on running structure formation simulations with the adaptive mesh refinement code FLASH. This is one movie that arose from this project, and shows the formation of a galaxy group down to redshift 1.2. The colours represent the gas density in the box averaged along the line of sight. From top left to bottom right the redshifts of the simulation outputs are 16, 6, 3.5, 2.4, 1.7, 1.2.

This movie shows, for the OWLS 100Mpc/h box, the fraction of the gas in the Universe that exists in different phases as a function of cosmic time.

The gas has been split into five phases, defined as follows:

• Interstellar medium (ISM): Dense, star-forming gas inside of galaxies
• Stars
• Intergalactic medium (IGM): Cold (T<10⁵K), underdense gas between galaxies
• Warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM): Warm-hot (10⁵K-10⁷K) gas shock heated by structure formation
• Intracluster medium (ICM): Hot (T>10⁷K) gas in the haloes of the most massive galaxy clusters

This movie shows, for the OWLS 100Mpc/h box the distribution of all baryons (left panel) and of the heavy elements (right panel) in density-temperature space as a function of redshift.