Astronomy simulations in VR

Immerse yourself in a simulation, because, why not ?

Paper here : https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06954

In this paper, we first describe how to create 360◦ videos from astrophysical simulations, then present what we believe is the first such video shared online, which shows the distribution of material expelled by Wolf-Rayet stars in the Galactic centre, and finally discuss potential scientific applications of 360◦ videos.

Cuadra et al. (2008, 2015) constructed numerical simulations of the 30 Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars and their winds orbiting Sgr A∗ within the central parsec of our galaxy. Starting from the stellar locations 1100 yr ago, the WRs orbit Sgr A∗ while ejecting their stellar wind material. The central parsec quickly fills up with an ambient medium, into which the newly ejected wind material plows, causing wind-blown bubbles from the slow-moving stars and bow shocks around the fast-moving WRs. The intent was to study the time-dependent accretion history of material onto Sgr A∗ (the WR winds are the dominant mass-injection source in the region)...

We created a 360◦ video from an updated hydrodynamic simulation of these 30 WR stars and their winds by rendering column density from the position of the centre of the simulation, i.e. at the location of Sgr A.

I meant to try this in FRELLED, but I'm not sure if it will work. There's a hard limit in Blender of 1024 image textures, and also the the object visibility depends on viewing angle, which might screw things up. It would be trivial to do 360 particle videos, but I don't have any simulations that would benefit from this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWiBIol7gzQ&feature=youtu.be