Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) logo

About 130 million years ago, two neutron stars collided, unleashing an explosion that rippled space-time and splattered the cosmos with a cocktail of heavy metals. Astronomers announced that they spotted the signals from that “kilonova” explosion, both in gravitational waves like the ones LIGO previously detected from merging black holes, and in signals across the

This movie shows the evolution of a star 20 times more massive than our sun. The blue color of the star’s surface visible in the first frame is the result of this higher mass.

Binary+single encounter that leads to an exchange, followed by a second binary+single encounter that leads to a collision Within star clusters, close encounters between single and multiple stars can be frequent and may lead to the production of exotic stars like X-ray sources and blue stragglers. By using the small-N-body code FEWBODY and another visualization

Triple+binary encounter that leads to a collision Within star clusters, close encounters between single and multiple stars can be frequent and may lead to the production of exotic stars like X-ray sources and blue stragglers. By using the small-N-body code FEWBODY and another visualization software, a few visualizations of interesting stellar encounters were created. In

Binary + single encounter that leads to a collision Within star clusters, close encounters between single and multiple stars can be frequent and may lead to the production of exotic stars like X-ray sources and blue stragglers. By using the small-N-body code FEWBODY and another visualization software, a few visualizations of interesting stellar encounters were

Binary+single encounter that leads to an exchange Within star clusters, close encounters between single and multiple stars can be frequent and may lead to the production of exotic stars like X-ray sources and blue stragglers. By using the small-N-body code FEWBODY and another visualization software, a few visualizations of interesting stellar encounters were created. In

This movie, Life of the Pleiades, was generated from an interactive visualization that Aaron Geller developed with Mark SubbaRao using Uniview. The interactive version can be shown on a planetarium dome, or rendered into a movie (as shown here). A 3D version of this movie exists in the Space Visualization Lab at the Adler Planetarium.

This movie shows the evolution of a star as massive as our sun. Each star spends most of its life in a phase known as the main sequence, during which it burns hydrogen into helium at its center and it slowly expands (as the reference circles show) to accommodate the energy produced via this nuclear

This movie, Life of the Pleiades, was generated from an interactive visualization that Aaron Geller developed with Mark SubbaRao using Uniview. The interactive version can be shown on a planetarium dome, or rendered into a movie (as shown here). A 3D version of this movie exists in the Space Visualization Lab at the Adler Planetarium.

This movie shows the evolution of a star 10 times more massive than our sun. The blue color of the star’s surface visible in the first frame is the result of this higher mass. Each star spends most of its life in a phase known as the main sequence, during which it burns hydrogen into

This movie shows one of the possible evolutionary scenarios of a binary system. Binary systems are star systems comprising two stars orbiting around their common center of mass in a Keplerian orbit, which means that the two components are bound together by their mutual gravitational attraction. In this movie, the binary system consists of a

This is a movie of the evolving color-magnitude diagram from the N-body model of the old open cluster NGC 188. Binaries are plotted with blue points, and show the combined light of the unresolved system. Single stars are plotted in black points. The dynamical and stellar evolution calculations were performed using NBODY6, with some modifications

Postdoctoral researcher Deanne Coppejans was the Northwestern media contact for the 2017 total solar eclipse. Here she is describing the science of the eclipse on NBC Chicago.

These are massive black hole mergers from the Illustris1 large-scale cosmological simulation  (Kelley et al 2017). Gravitational wave bursts from the final merger of each black hole pair are shown with the color representing their initial strength.