Back by the popular demand of no one, below are a few movies made from the research that I do. Some of them make use of the smoothed-particle hydrodynamics visualization tool SPLASH.
Tidal Disruption and Core Reformation (a “Zombie” TDE)
In the above movie a star is destroyed by the tides of a supermassive black hole and a core reforms under self-gravity at a later time. A core rises from the tidally shredded debris in the form of a “zombie core.” Check out our paper on this sort of stuff here.
Strong Explosion
This illustrates a strong, energy-conserving explosion: energy is deposited into a static medium, and this energy deposition drives the formation of a shockwave into the gas. The gas left in the wake of the shock is heated and increased in density; colors scale with the density, with red (blue) being highest (lowest) density. A paper on the mildly relativistic generalization (when the shock is moving close to the speed of light ~ 300,000 km/s !) of this can be found here.
Star Crushed by a Black Hole
A star “crushed” by a supermassive black hole; the left-hand panel shows the projection of the density onto the orbital plane of the star, while the right-hand panel shows the projection out of the plane. When the star nears pericenter (its point of closest approach, around ~ 8s in the movie), the star is highly compressed into a small fraction of its original height. We had a couple of papers out on this subject here and here. This movie was made by Chris Nixon.
