STUNNING SCIENCE VISUALIZATIONS FEATURED IN
NEW SPACE SHOW AT ROSE CENTER FOR EARTH AND SPACE

DYNAMIC COLLABORATION OF SCIENCE, ART, AND TECHNOLOGY YIELDS UNIQUE 3-D JOURNEY THROUGH SPACE AND TIME

Cosmic Collisions, the spectacular new Space Show that premieres on March 18, 2006, in the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center for Earth and Space, is the result of a complex fusion of cutting-edge astrophysics research and state-of-the-art science visualization expertise. The production process started, for nearly all of the show's sequences, with the scientific endeavor called simulation. This involved mathematically describing and computationally modeling the complex physical events the Space Show portrays—such as the impact of an asteroid with Earth or the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. The next step was to turn numerical simulations or data sets into graphic animations called visualizations. The Show's production team built flight paths that create the experience of flying through space and made illustration decisions, including color and lighting assignments. As production proceeded, visualizations were rendered for viewing at successively higher and more detailed resolutions for display on the 100-foot-diameter Hayden Planetarium dome. The Museum's production team wrote multiple pieces of software to transform complex, dynamic data sets, such as 2-D image files of the M51 and Whirlpool galaxies taken by NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, into 3-D volumes moving through time. All rendering for the new Space Show was completed at the Museum, with the exception of one sequence.

Astrophysics has entered a phase of tremendous discovery and expansion in the past ten years thanks to advances in observing and computing technology. As a result, mathematical and visual models of the universe and its physical processes, like those that form the basis for Cosmic Collisions, now are built from enormous observational and theoretical sets of data. Cluster supercomputers at the Museum and elsewhere, made up of individual computers or computer chips and boards hooked together, are ideally suited to manipulate those data in order to get results in matters of weeks and months rather than years or centuries. By dividing large data sets across multiple storage and computation sites and running operations on them simultaneously, these cluster supercomputers can manipulate extremely complex data sets at speeds far exceeding those of an ordinary desktop computer. The Museum's production team also consulted with or utilized facilities at two of the nation's leading National Science Foundation supercomputing centers, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Illinois and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC).

Simulations

The creation of simulations involves applying the laws of physics to predict how nature behaves. Scientists then compare observational data with competing predictions to advance and refine their descriptions.

For instance, the simulation of the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies is based on the work of Yuexing Li, a former graduate student who worked in the Museum's Department of Astrophysics, and Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, Associate Curator and Curator-in-Charge of the Department of Astrophysics, Division of Physical Sciences. Drs. Li and Mac Low computed the behavior of stars, gas, and dark matter in the colliding galaxies, modeling the force of gravity distributed across millions of virtual particles and following pressure gradients and shock waves in the gas. These computations required more than four CPU-years of computer time (a CPU-year is the run time of one central processing unit, or CPU, in a cluster running continuously for a year), but took less than a month to complete on 64 processors at PSC.

An illustration of a globular cluster based on the work of Michael M. Shara, Curator in the Museum's Department of Astrophysics and curator of Cosmic Collisions, was developed and computed on a special-purpose gravity pipeline processor at the Museum known as the GRAPE 6—special hardware into which scientists can plug a personal computer to obtain teraflops of performance (trillions of calculations per second). The Museum owns and operates five GRAPE 6 boards, and this cluster currently is capable of five teraflops, the equivalent of 1,666 Pentium 4 processors. Museum astrophysicists use the GRAPE 6 cluster to study the evolution of star clusters and the orbits of stars and planets in them controlled by gravitational forces. Museum biologists have been using in-house parallel computing facilities since 1993. With Museum astrophysicists, they built a fourth-generation machine as part of the Museum's Parallel Computing Facility in 2003, comprising 256 Intel Pentium 4 processors linked in a cluster. The biologists use this cluster for such projects as sorting out the most likely family trees to describe the evolutionary relationships among groups of organisms, while the astrophysicists use the cluster to run models similar to the colliding galaxy simulation shown in Cosmic Collisions along with other models of interstellar gas dynamics.

Other simulations in the Space Show were computed by Jon Genetti and Syun Akasofu of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Charles Goodrich and Timothy Guild of Boston University, Robin Canup of the Southwest Research Institute, James Lombardi of Vassar College, and Galen Gisler and Robert Greene of Los Alamos National Laboratories. Steele Hill of NASA provided important Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite imagery used in the Show.

Hayden Planetarium Space Theater Technology

The Hayden Planetarium's 429-seat Space Theater is one of the world's largest virtual reality simulators. The theater showcases a virtual map of billions of stars and galaxies called the Digital Universe, created at the American Museum of Natural History with support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which includes the largest and most comprehensive scientifically accurate 3-D computer model of the Milky Way galaxy ever assembled. The new Cosmic Collisions show, as well as the Rose Center's inaugural Space Show, Passport to the Universe, and the follow-up success, The Search for Life: Are We Alone? rely on the Digital Universe to communicate the vastness of space and to display the different objects that populate the universe.

Space Show Production Team

The production team for Cosmic Collisions includes science visualizers, digital artists, producers, engineers, sound designers, educators and more. The Space Show's Executive Producer is Anthony Braun, whose group was headed by Visualization Director Carter Emmart and Producer Christopher Scollard. The Director of Rose Center Engineering is Benjy Bernhardt.

Development and Sponsorship

Cosmic Collisions was developed by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, in collaboration with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science; GOTO, Inc., Tokyo, Japan; and the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, China.

Cosmic Collisions was created by the American Museum of Natural History with the major support and partnership of the Heliophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate and was made possible with the generous support of CIT.