Birth of Planet Earth | CADENS | Visualization | Enabling Discovery

Photosynthesis in a Chromatophore

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Early one-celled bacteria could survive by capturing the energy of sunlight. Later, using similar chemical machinery, plants evolved; they helped re-oxygenate the planet and stem the loss of water. Captured sunlight drives a chain of processes, transforming the energy into more stable forms at each step, eventually producing molecules of ATP – the universal currency of life on Earth – with which the bacteria can feed, locomote and reproduce.

Credit: Klaus Schulten, Melih Sener, John Stone, Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Visualization by Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, U. of Illinois

The Collision that Formed the Moon

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Theia, a hypothesized planet in the ancient solar system, slams into the Earth. Earth will soon be enveloped in vaporized rock, some of it hotter than the surface of the sun. Theia doesn’t survive the impact – its remains become mixed with debris from Earth, and are either flung out into space or become part of the Earth-Moon system. In the first 24 hours, some of the collision debris coalesces into what will become the Moon. Remaining material will swirl around Earth for as much as a century, gradually accumulating onto the Moon, or falling back to Earth.

Credit: Robin Canup, Southwest Research Institute.

Visualization by Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, U. of Illinois.

Milky Way Analogue Isolated Disk Galaxy

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Countless supernovae explosions have seeded our galaxy with planet-building elements.

Credit: Nathan Goldbaum, National Center for Supercomputing Applications; Mark Krumholz, Australian National University; John Forbes, Harvard Institute for Theory and Computation.

Visualization by Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, U. of Illinois.

Formation Of The Solar System

A dense, rotating clump within a giant cloud of gas and dust, collapsing underits own gravity, starts the formation of our Sun and its planets.

Credit: Kevin Walsh, Southwest Research Institute; CRIMSON Beowulf Cluster at Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur; Alessandro Morbidelli, Sean Raymond, David O’Brien, Avi Mandell; Aaron Boley, U. of British Columbia; Alexei Kritsuk and Michael Norman, U. of California, San Diego.

Visualization by Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, U. of Illinois.

Grand Tack

The gravity of Jupiter (outermost orbit) destabilizes the orbits of early innerplanets. Many collide with each other; some are ejected from the solar system.

Credit: Kevin Walsh, Southwest Research Institute; CRIMSON Beowulf Cluster at Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur; Alessandro Morbidelli, Sean Raymond, David O’Brien, Avi Mandell.

Visualization by Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, U. of Illinois.

Earth - Early Atmosphere

Before the appearance of living organisms, Earth looked very different from the Blue Marble we are used to seeing in space photos.

Credit: DEM data provided by the Polar Geospatial Center. Claire Porter, Paul Morin et al., 2018 “ArcticDEM”.

Visualization by Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, U. of Illinois.

Atmosphere Satellites

Today, as we look down on our planet, we marvel at its complex life support system - the climate.

Credit: Larry DiGirolamo, Guangyu Zhao, Yizhe Zhan, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Visualization by Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, U. of Illinois.