Space… in 3-D!

Today I've got one and a half stories published on SLAC Today. Why the half you ask? Well, one of them is a short little blurb about the SLAC Summer Institute that is starting in two weeks. This year's topic is dark matter, and I actually wish I could go to learn more about it. It's a fascinating topic. Maybe they'll let me slip into a couple of the lectures…

Anyways, what I really wanted to talk about today is the second story about 3-D animations at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics (KIPAC) visualization lab. I personally visited the visualization lab and was very impressed with what I saw.

You can read the article for details, but I'll give you the highlights here. There are two projectors which have a polarized light filter over each of their lenses. Polarizing light is basically making sure that only waves traveling in exactly the same direction make it through. Anything coming at an angle doesn't make it.

When light is polarized in two different directions, and special glasses with similarly polarized lenses are worn, the effect is a 3-D image. But I'm not talking about your typical cartoons here.

No, instead these movies are created from actual data taken from space. Through complex observations, and even more complex calculations which can take weeks, scientists can form models of really cool events like galaxies forming, the early universe expanding, black holes colliding, and more.

This data is then fed into a rendering program written here at SLAC. You can't find it anywhere else. The program takes the data and creates a 3-D movie in a matter of days, if not hours. The difficult part is actually deciding what you want to highlight. You can't visualize more than one variable at a time. It wouldn't make sense to show the expansion of the universe via temperature and density variations at the same time.

Instead, the lead choreographer, for lack of a better term, chooses which variable will best highlight the data. He also chooses what color scheme to use and which angles to view the movie in. These sorts of decisions can take weeks, but the results are stunning. You can check some of these movies out at the KIPAC's website.

Also, there is another program that lets you imagine you are the captain of the Enterprise (I know I'm a dork.) Again using real data, you can fly through an actual representation of the Milky Way galaxy. You can choose which direction to fly and how far, and the stars passing have real names and data. It's pretty neat.