Interactive three-dimensional simulations & visualizations
Visualizing the beauty in physics and mathematics
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Andromeda Milky Way collision
In roughly four and a half billion years, our Milky Way galaxy will collide with our nearest neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy.
The demo below simulates this future collision. It is based on a very simple model:
- Both galaxy’s contain only a very limited amount of stars compared to the real amounts in both galaxy’s (1400 for the Milky way and 2800 for the Andromeda)
- No super-massive black holes at the center of either galaxy
- The masses of the stars and their positions are randomly picked from a normal distribution, generated from a uniform distribution using a Box-Müller transform.
- VPython's
simple_sphereobjects are used to optimize performance.
Additional information
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Even more spectacular and realistic pictures and animations can be found on nasa.gov.
- Wikipedia also contains many pictures and a lot of background information on the upcoming Andromeda and Milky Way collision
- This article summarizes shortly the possible scenarios for our solar system as well. However, by that time all life will have disappeared already on planet Earth, as the sun’s luminosity will have increased by over 30% by that time, boiling and evaporating the oceans into oblivion.
Spiral galaxy renderer
On this site, you can also find a live demo of a way more advanced 2D spiral galaxy simulator that is based on the density wave theory (on GitHub → Galaxy renderer). It is written by Ingo Berg in Typescript. Click on the image below to activate this demo!
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