First Place, 2017

Most stars in the Universe are not in isolation, but rather form in clusters. In the most compact clusters, a million stars as bright as a billion suns are packed within just a few light-years. This image shows the turbulent gas structures in a three-dimensional, multi-physics supercomputer simulation during the formation of such massive clusters, with the red-to-violet rainbow spectrum representing gas at high-to-low densities. Stars are the fundamental building blocks of galaxies, and of the Universe as a whole, and understanding star formation provides crucial insights to the history and future of our cosmos. The simulation and the visualization were produced locally on the Texas-sized supercomputers, Stampede and Lonestar 5, at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).

Credit:
Benny Tsang
Astronomy Graduate Student