MilkyWay@Home project details

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Alez
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#1 MilkyWay@Home project details

Post by Alez »

MilkyWay@Home

http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/index.php

About MilkyWay@Home

Milkyway@Home uses the BOINC platform to harness volunteered computing resources, creating a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.

In computer science, the project is investigating different optimization methods which are resilient to the fault-prone, heterogeneous and asynchronous nature of Internet computing; such as evolutionary and genetic algorithms, as well as asynchronous newton methods. While in astroinformatics, Milkyway@Home is generating highly accurate three dimensional models of the Sagittarius stream, which provides knowledge about how the Milky Way galaxy was formed and how tidal tails are created when galaxies merge.

Milkyway@Home is a joint effort between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's departments of Computer Science and Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy. Feel free to contact us via our forums, or email astro[at]cs.lists.rpi[dot]edu.

Science Summary

Milkyway@home studies the history of our galaxy by analyzing the stars in the Milky Way galaxy's Galactic Halo. This includes searching for elusive dark matter. This research is done by mapping structures of stars orbiting the Milky Way - many these structures are actually "tidal debris streams," or dwarf galaxies that are being pulled apart by our Galaxy's superior gravitational field. The orbits, shapes, and compositions of these dwarf galaxies provide vital clues to the history of our Galaxy, as well as to the distribution of dark matter.

Additionally, Milkyway@home has recently started developing the "N-body" sub-project, which creates simulated dwarf galaxies and "shoots" them into the Milky Way's gravitational field. We allow the simulated dwarf galaxy's initial conditions to vary until the final simulated dwarf matches what we see in actual halo structures. In other words, we are trying to match dwarf galaxy models to real data, in order to learn more about what is (and what isn't) possible for our Galaxy.

For both projects, we use data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey(see below)

Until the late 1990's, the Galactic halo was thought to smooth and uninteresting, and Heidi Newberg's 2002 paper ("The Ghost of Sagittarius and Lumps in the Halo of the Milky Way") proved that the halo is actually full of these tidal debris (the halo is "lumpy"). Since then, astronomers have been actively searching for and characterizing these structures. So Milkyway@home is doing science in a field that's barely over ten years old - this is cutting edge astronomy, and we want you to be a part of it!
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