Astronomy 2014
38 x 64 x 3 in (h x w x d)

Honorable Mention, 2014

In less than a billion years after the Big Bang, the first galaxies flooded the universe with enough ultraviolet starlight to ionize every atom in the intergalactic gas and heat it to 10,000 degrees. This snapshot from a 3D supercomputer simulation shows how the hot, ionized gas (bright patches) was distributed around the millions of galaxies that ionized it in a piece of the expanding universe 300 million light-years across today, centered on our Milky Way Galaxy, when “reionization” was half-over. Red and blue represent high-density and low-density gas, respectively.

Credit:
Hyunbae Park, Paul Shapiro, Junhwan Choi, and Anson D'Aloisio of Prof. Shapiro's Cosmology Research Group in the UT Department of Astronomy, using data supplied by Pierre Ocvirk (U. of Strasbourg) from a simulation of hydrodynamics, radiation, and gravity by Shapiro and his international collaboration team under DOE INCITE Program Award AST031 on the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with support from NSF AST-1009799, NASA NNX11AE09G, and NASA JPL SURP Project Nbr. 1492788, with image processed at the UT Texas Advanced Computing Center under NSF XSEDE TG-AST0900005.

Exhibited by:

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