Mastodawn

Matthias Steinmetz Nov 3, 2022

Greetings #astrodon world!

I am Matthias, I am director of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and professor at U Potsdam.

I love stars and galaxies, in particular Galactic archeology, galaxy formation, large surveys and big simulations.

Astronomy is not only very cool science, but also part of our culture, and I find science history fascinating.

I also enjoy doing astrophotography (www.astrobin.com/users/GalacticRAVE)

so to make it short: a space nerd.

#introduction

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Richard Hendricks

@GalacticRAVE Hello Matthias! I was wondering if there are any open-source galactic simulations amateurs could play with. I found the SHARK simulation at https://github.com/ICRAR/shark but it's semi-analytic and I was hoping for pretty pictures, if very slowly, on my gaming PC.

GitHub - ICRAR/shark

Contribute to ICRAR/shark development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

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Matthias Steinmetz Nov 4, 2022

@hendric what do you have in mind? If you think e.g. of N-body simulations, you can do some pretty cool experiment (the PCs today are much more powerful than the Cray on which I ran my PhD thesis), e.g. smashing MW and Andromeda into each other. A common resource is Volker Springel’s Gadget codes, which has several versions in the public domain and is pretty well documented.

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Richard Hendricks Nov 4, 2022

@GalacticRAVE Thanks, this is perfect! I figured the same re supercomputers of yore vs high end desktops of today. My new gaming desktop will have happy spinning fans simulation galaxies smashing!