Reconstructing the History of the Local Universe

IUB scientist Dr. Matthias Hoeft and collaborators from Spain, and Germany have been granted a record allowance on European supercomputers to reconstruct the history of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

[ Dec 07, 2005]  The consortium of European supercomputer centers DEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications) awarded a computing time of 1.5 Million processor hours to the joint project “Our Local Universe”. DEISA checks proposals of European research projects and distributes time. The allowance has a value of more than 1 Million Euros.

The purpose of this project is to study the evolution and past of our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, and its neighbours, the Magellanic Clouds, the Andromeda nebula, and other smaller galaxies. “So far, our images from those galaxies are just snapshots, they show us the present state of our local Universe”, says Dr. Matthias Hoeft. “As we cannot travel into the past, astronomers have to reconstruct the evolution of galaxies from those images using very powerful computers. At the end of this project we will understand in detail how the Milky Way came into being.”