{ "id": 10662, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10662/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "Webb Science Simulations: Planetary Systems and Origins of Life", "description": "Supercomputer simulations of planeratry evolution. Part 1: Turbulent Molecular Cloud Nebula with Protostellar ObjectsThe Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) collaborated with NASA and Drs. Alexei Kritsuk and Michael Norman to visualize a computational data set of a turbulent molecular cloud nebula forming protostellar objects and accretion disks approximately 100 AU in diameter, on the order of the size of our solar system. AVL used its Amore software to interpolate and render the Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) simulation generated from ENZO code for cosmology and astrophysics. The AMR simulation was developed by Drs. Kritsuk and Norman at the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics. The AMR simulation generated more than 2 terabytes of data and follows star formation processes in a self-gravitating turbulent molecular cloud with a dynamic range of half-a-million in linear scale, resolving both the large-scale filamentary structure of the molecular cloud (~5 parsec) and accretion disks around emerging young protostellar objects (down to 2 AU). Part 2: Protoplanetary Disk and Planet FormationThe Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) collaborated with NASA and Dr. Aaron Boley to visualize the 16,000 year evolution of a young, isolated protoplanetary disk which surrounds a newly-formed protostar. The disk forms spiral arms and a dense clump as a result of gravitational collapse. Dr. Aaron Boley developed this computational model to investigate the response of young disks to mass accretion from their surrounding envelopes, including the direct formation of planets and brown dwarfs through gravitational instability. The main formation mechanism for gas giant planets has been debated within the scientific community for over a decade. One of these theories is 'direct formation through gravitational instability.' If the self-gravity of the gas overwhelms the disk's thermal pressure and the stabilizing effect of differential rotation, the gas closest to the protostar rotates faster than gas farther away. In this scenario, regions of the gaseous disk collapse and form a planet directly. The study, presented in Boley (2009), explores whether mass accretion in the outer regions of disks can lead to such disk fragmentation. The simulations show that clumps can form in situ at large disk radii. If the clumps survive, they can become gas giants on wide orbits, e.g., Fomalhaut b, or even more massive objects called brown dwarfs. Whether a disk forms planets at large radii and, if so, the number of planets that form, depend on how much of the envelope mass is distributed at large distances from the protostar. The results of the simulations suggest that there are two modes of gas giant planet formation. The first mode occurs early in the disk's lifetime, at large radii, and through the disk instability mechanism. After the main accretion phase is over, gas giants can form in the inner disk, over a period of a million years, through the core accretion mechanism, which researchers are addressing in other studies.Thanks to R. H. Durisen, L. Mayer, and G. Lake for comments and discussions relating to this research. This study was supported in part by the University of Zurich, Institute for Theoretical Physics, and by a Swiss Federal Grant. Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center.AVL at NCSA, University of Illinois. || ", "release_date": "2021-04-14T00:00:00-04:00", "update_date": "2025-01-06T01:14:37.497133-05:00", "main_image": { "id": 378967, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010600/a010662/Nebula_Tour_1.00002_print.jpg", "filename": "Nebula_Tour_1.00002_print.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "JWST Science Simulations: Nebula Tour 1.This visualization shows a tour of a turbulent molecular cloud forming multiple protoplanetary disks. Credits: NCSA, NASA, A. Kritsuk, M. Norman", "width": 1024, "height": 576, "pixels": 589824 }, "main_video": null, "main_credits": { "Visualizations by": [ { "name": "Donna Cox", "employer": "AVL NCSA/University of Illinois" } ] }, "progress": "Complete", "media_groups": [ { "id": 343797, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10662/#media_group_343797", "widget": "Basic text with HTML", "title": "", "caption": "", "description": "Supercomputer simulations of planeratry evolution.

Part 1: Turbulent Molecular Cloud Nebula with Protostellar Objects

The Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) collaborated with NASA and Drs. Alexei Kritsuk and Michael Norman to visualize a computational data set of a turbulent molecular cloud nebula forming protostellar objects and accretion disks approximately 100 AU in diameter, on the order of the size of our solar system. AVL used its Amore software to interpolate and render the Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) simulation generated from ENZO code for cosmology and astrophysics. The AMR simulation was developed by Drs. Kritsuk and Norman at the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics.

The AMR simulation generated more than 2 terabytes of data and follows star formation processes in a self-gravitating turbulent molecular cloud with a dynamic range of half-a-million in linear scale, resolving both the large-scale filamentary structure of the molecular cloud (~5 parsec) and accretion disks around emerging young protostellar objects (down to 2 AU).

Part 2: Protoplanetary Disk and Planet Formation

The Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) collaborated with NASA and Dr. Aaron Boley to visualize the 16,000 year evolution of a young, isolated protoplanetary disk which surrounds a newly-formed protostar. The disk forms spiral arms and a dense clump as a result of gravitational collapse. Dr. Aaron Boley developed this computational model to investigate the response of young disks to mass accretion from their surrounding envelopes, including the direct formation of planets and brown dwarfs through gravitational instability.

The main formation mechanism for gas giant planets has been debated within the scientific community for over a decade. One of these theories is 'direct formation through gravitational instability.' If the self-gravity of the gas overwhelms the disk's thermal pressure and the stabilizing effect of differential rotation, the gas closest to the protostar rotates faster than gas farther away. In this scenario, regions of the gaseous disk collapse and form a planet directly. The study, presented in Boley (2009), explores whether mass accretion in the outer regions of disks can lead to such disk fragmentation. The simulations show that clumps can form in situ at large disk radii. If the clumps survive, they can become gas giants on wide orbits, e.g., Fomalhaut b, or even more massive objects called brown dwarfs. Whether a disk forms planets at large radii and, if so, the number of planets that form, depend on how much of the envelope mass is distributed at large distances from the protostar.

The results of the simulations suggest that there are two modes of gas giant planet formation. The first mode occurs early in the disk's lifetime, at large radii, and through the disk instability mechanism. After the main accretion phase is over, gas giants can form in the inner disk, over a period of a million years, through the core accretion mechanism, which researchers are addressing in other studies.

Thanks to R. H. Durisen, L. Mayer, and G. Lake for comments and discussions relating to this research. This study was supported in part by the University of Zurich, Institute for Theoretical Physics, and by a Swiss Federal Grant. Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center.

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Norman, Rick Wagner, APJL submitted 2010 & The Two Modes of Gas Giant Planet Formation, Boley, Aaron C., The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 695, Issue 1, pp. L53-L57 (2009)" ], "datasets": [], "nasa_science_categories": [ "Planets & Moons", "Universe" ], "keywords": [ "Brown Dwarf", "Evolution", "HDTV", "Hubble Space Telescope", "Hydrodynamic Simulation", "Hyperwall", "James Webb Space Telescope", "JWST", "Molecular Cloud", "Planetary Science", "Planets", "Protoplanetary Disk", "Re-ionization", "Space", "Space science", "Star", "Webb Telescope" ], "recommended_pages": [], "related": [ { "id": 11541, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11541/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "Creating Gas Giants", "description": "Ancient civilizations observed Jupiter in the night sky, but humanity still doesn’t completely understand how it and other giant gas planets are born. One theory is that they began as rocky planets that slowly accumulated thick atmospheres and expanded into big gaseous bodies over millions of years. But there might be a faster route. Solar systems grow from protoplanetary disks, a large stew of primordial gases surrounding a massive solar seed called a protostar. Over thousands of years, the protostar’s gravity sucks in material from the disk’s outer reaches. As more gas swirls inward, it’s packed into dense spiral arms. While the protostar will eventually consume the gas closest to it, material farther away may spin off and condense into a Jupiter-like planet. Watch the video to see this process unfold. || ", "release_date": "2014-06-05T00:00:00-04:00", "update_date": "2023-05-03T13:50:50.868364-04:00", "main_image": { "id": 455605, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011500/a011541/cover-1920.jpg", "filename": "cover-1920.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "Scientists are still researching—and debating—how large gaseous planets form.", "width": 1920, "height": 1080, "pixels": 2073600 } }, { "id": 10847, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10847/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "Spiral Arms Point to Possible Planets in a Star's Dusty Disk", "description": "A new image of the disk of gas and dust around a sun-like star is the first to show spiral-arm-like structures. These features may provide clues to the presence of embedded but as-yet-unseen planets.The newly imaged disk surrounds SAO 206462, an 8.7-magnitude star located about 456 light-years away in the constellation Lupus. Astronomers estimate that the system is only about 9 million years old. The gas-rich disk spans some 14 billion miles, which is more than twice the size of Pluto's orbit in our own solar system. The Subaru near-infrared image reveals a pair of spiral features arcing along the outer disk. Theoretical models show that a single embedded planet may produce a spiral arm on each side of a disk. The structures around SAO 206462 do not form a matched pair, suggesting the presence of two unseen worlds, one for each arm. || ", "release_date": "2011-10-19T09:30:00-04:00", "update_date": "2025-01-05T00:16:53.971708-05:00", "main_image": { "id": 482850, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010800/a010847/SAO206462_dust_arms_nolabels_Small.jpg", "filename": "SAO206462_dust_arms_nolabels_Small.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "Two spiral arms emerge from the gas-rich disk around SAO 206462, a young star in the constellation Lupus. This image, acquired by the Subaru Telescope and its HiCIAO instrument, is the first to show spiral arms in a circumstellar disk. The disk itself is some 14 billion miles across, or about twice the size of Pluto's orbit in our own solar system. No Labels. Credit: NAOJ/Subaru", "width": 1500, "height": 1163, "pixels": 1744500 } }, { "id": 10661, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10661/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "JWST Science Simulations: Galaxy Formation", "description": "Supercomputer Simulations of Galaxy Formation and Evolution. This visualization shows small galaxies forming, interacting, and merging to make ever-larger galaxies. This 'hierarchical structure formation' is driven by gravity and results in the creation of galaxies with spiral arms much like our own Milky Way galaxy. The Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) simulation generated from ENZO code for cosmology and astrophysics was developed by Drs. Brian O'Shea and Michael Norman. The AMR code generated 1.8 terabytes of data and was computed at NCSA. AVL used Amore software (http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/what-we-do/software) to interpolate and render 2700 frames (42 gigabytes of HD images). The simulation spans a time period of 13.7 billion years. This visualization provides insight into the assembly and formation of galaxies. James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will probe the earliest periods of galaxy formation by looking deep into space to see the first galaxies that form in the universe, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) collaborated with NASA and Drs. Brian O'Shea and Michael Norman to visualize the formation of a Milky Way-type galaxy. The Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) simulation generated from ENZO code for cosmology and astrophysics was developed by Drs. Brian O'Shea and Michael Norman. The AMR code generated 1.8 terabytes of data and was computed at NCSA. AVL used Amore software (http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/what-we-do/software) to interpolate and render 2700 frames (42 gigabytes of HD images). The simulation spans a time period of 13.7 billion years. This visualization provides insight into the assembly and formation of galaxies. James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will probe the earliest periods of galaxy formation by looking deep into space to see the first galaxies that form in the universe, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.AVL(http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/) at NCSA (http://ncsa.illinois.edu/), University of Illinois (www.illinois.edu) || ", "release_date": "2010-11-01T00:00:00-04:00", "update_date": "2025-01-06T01:14:37.073051-05:00", "main_image": { "id": 489947, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010600/a010661/Galaxy_Evolution_wideshot-1080p.00170_print.jpg", "filename": "Galaxy_Evolution_wideshot-1080p.00170_print.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "JWST Science Simulations: Galaxy Evolution wideshot. This visualization shows small galaxies forming, interacting, and merging to form Milky Way-type galaxies with spiral arms. ", "width": 1024, "height": 576, "pixels": 589824 } }, { "id": 10663, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10663/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "Webb Science Simulations: Re-Ionization Era", "description": "The visualization shows galaxies, composed of gas, stars and dark matter, colliding and forming filaments in the large-scale universe providing a view of the Cosmic Web. The Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) collaborated with NASA and Drs. Renyue Cen and Jeremiah Ostriker to visualize a simulation of the nonlinear cosmological evolution of the universe. Drs. Cen and Ostriker developed one of the largest cosmological hydrodynamic simulations and computed over 749 gigabytes of raw data at the NCSA in 2005. AVL used Amore software (http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/what-we-do/software) to interpolate and render approximately 322 gigabytes of a subset of the computed data. The simulation begins about 20 million years after the Big Bang - about 13.7 billion years ago - and extends until the present day.AVL(http://avl.ncsa.illinois.edu/) at NCSA (http://ncsa.illinois.edu/), University of Illinois (www.illinois.edu) || ", "release_date": "2010-11-01T00:00:00-04:00", "update_date": "2025-01-06T01:14:37.934932-05:00", "main_image": { "id": 489964, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010600/a010663/Re-Ionization-Galaxy_Evolution-tracking_shot-H264-720p.01327_print.jpg", "filename": "Re-Ionization-Galaxy_Evolution-tracking_shot-H264-720p.01327_print.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "JWST Science Simulations: Galaxy Evolution tracking animation. This visualization shows galaxies, composed of gas, stars and dark matter, colliding and forming filaments in the large-scale universe providing in a view of the Cosmic Web. ", "width": 1024, "height": 576, "pixels": 589824 } }, { "id": 10687, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10687/", "page_type": "Produced Video", "title": "JWST Science Simulation: Galaxy Collision", "description": "The Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) collaborated with NASA and Drs. Brant Robertson and Lars Hernquist to visualize two colliding galaxies that interact and merge into a single elliptical galaxy over a period spanning two billion years of evolution. The scientific theoretical model and the computational data output were developed by Drs. Brant Robertson and Lars Hernquist. AVL rendered more than 80 gigabytes of this data using in-house rendering software and Virtual Director for camera choreography. This computation provides important research to understand galaxy mergers, and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will provide data to test such theories. When two large disk-shaped galaxies merge — as will happen within the next few billion years with the Milky Way galaxy and its largest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy — the result will likely settle into a cloud-shaped elliptical galaxy. Most elliptical galaxies observed today formed from collisions that occurred billions of years ago. It is difficult to observe such collisions now with ground-based telescopes since these collisions are billions of light-years away. JWST will probe in unprecedented detail those distant epochs, and provide exquisite images of mergers caught in the act of destroying disk galaxies.AVL at NCSA University of Illinois || ", "release_date": "2010-10-29T00:00:00-04:00", "update_date": "2025-01-05T00:16:52.746914-05:00", "main_image": { "id": 489237, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010600/a010687/Galaxy_Collision-H264_720p.00652_print.jpg", "filename": "Galaxy_Collision-H264_720p.00652_print.jpg", "media_type": "Image", "alt_text": "This visualization shows two colliding galaxies that merge into a single elliptical galaxy over a period spanning two billion years. Credits: NCSA, NASA, B. Robertson, L. Hernquist", "width": 1024, "height": 576, "pixels": 589824 } } ], "sources": [], "products": [], "newer_versions": [], "older_versions": [], "alternate_versions": [] }