CosmoVis: An Interactive Visual Analysis Tool for Exploring Hydrodynamic Cosmological Simulations

We introduce CosmoVis , an open source web-based visualization tool for the interactive analysis of massive hydrodynamic cosmological simulation data. CosmoVis was designed in close collaboration with astrophysicists to enable researchers and citizen scientists to share and explore these datasets, a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 2022-08, Vol.28 (8), p.2909-2925
Main Authors: Abramov, David, Burchett, Joseph N., Elek, Oskar, Hummels, Cameron, Prochaska, J. Xavier, Forbes, Angus G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Absorption
Analytical models
astrographics
astronomy
astrophysics
Astrovis
Computational modeling
Computer architecture
cosmological simulations
Dark matter
Data models
Data structures
Data visualization
Datasets
Hydrodynamics
Simulation
Software
Spectrum analysis
virtual spectrography
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Summary:We introduce CosmoVis , an open source web-based visualization tool for the interactive analysis of massive hydrodynamic cosmological simulation data. CosmoVis was designed in close collaboration with astrophysicists to enable researchers and citizen scientists to share and explore these datasets, and to use them to investigate a range of scientific questions. CosmoVis visualizes many key gas, dark matter, and stellar attributes extracted from the source simulations, which typically consist of complex data structures multiple terabytes in size, often requiring extensive data wrangling. CosmoVis introduces a range of features to facilitate real-time analysis of these simulations, including the use of "virtual skewers," simulated analogues of absorption line spectroscopy that act as spectral probes piercing the volume of gaseous cosmic medium. We explain how such synthetic spectra can be used to gain insight into the source datasets and to make functional comparisons with observational data. Furthermore, we identify the main analysis tasks that CosmoVis enables and present implementation details of the software interface and the client-server architecture. We conclude by providing details of three contemporary scientific use cases that were conducted by domain experts using the software and by documenting expert feedback from astrophysicists at different career levels.
ISSN:1077-2626
1941-0506
DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2022.3159630