Astronomers at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Zurich have created a video that allows viewers to visualize the birth of the Milky Way galaxy.

"Previous efforts to form a massive disk galaxy like the Milky Way had failed because the simulated galaxies ended up with huge central bulges compared to the size of the disk," co-author Javiera Guedes said.

Astronomers have been trying to come up with a suitable scenario about the formation of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way but have always fallen short of getting the right galaxy. Guedes and her colleagues used NASA's Pleiades supercomputer with additional help from the Swiss National Supercomputing Center and UC-Santa Cruz.

"We took some risk spending a huge amount of supercomputer time to simulate a single galaxy with extra-high resolution," said UC-Santa Cruz astronomer Piero Madau, another co-author.

Using high-resolution models, the team was able to get a more realistic simulation of star formation than previous efforts.

"Star formation in real galaxies occurs in a clustered fashion, and to reproduce that out of a cosmological simulation is hard," Madau said. "This is the first simulation that is able to resolve the high-density clouds of gas where star formation occurs, and the result is a Milky Way-type of galaxy with a small bulge and a big disk."

Although the team's efforts came up with spectacular graphics, the point of the simulation was to prove the theory that galaxies formed because cold dark matter influenced the density of matter to clump them together. The Eris galaxy simulation "shows that the cold dark matter scenario, where dark matter provides the scaffolding for galaxy formation, is able to generate realistic disk-dominated galaxies," Madau said.