Astera is an ongoing project at the Astronomy Group at the University of Southampton. Astera started as an interactive cosmological visualization tool. Currently, we are developing a game about the evolution of galaxies under the codename Astera Evolution.
Astera is the first game that teaches about the evolution of galaxies. Astera closes an important gap which has been ignored both by the gaming industry and non-university education . Astera combines challenging game mechanics and state-of-the-art insights from Astronomy to create a game that is both educational and fun.
In Astera Evolution, you can experience influence galaxy mergers where two galaxies collide and change to fate of the resulting galaxy. Through our game, you will learn and understand in a fun and engaging way how galaxies evolved over time.
To give the player a 3-dimensional representation of galaxies, we use galaxy images obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope and map them to particle effects created by the Niagara System of Unreal® Engine 5. With this technique, the player can view a galaxy from any angle and appreciate its structure.
Astera Evolution provides tutorials, which explain the main concepts of the game, and many different challenges. These challenges are spread across multiple scenarios to ensure long-term engagement with our game. The better you can complete the scenarios to more additional scenarios you can unlock. Will you be able to complete them all?
Astera is a cosmological visualization tool currently being developed at the University of Southampton. Running on a modified version of Unreal Engine, this software renders large cosmological simulations in real time, allowing for interactive, first person control of the universe you have simulated. Although not currently ready for public release, we are excited to show you some of what we are working on. We use hundreds of galaxy images extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to represent our galaxies. Any dataset can be used to describe their coordinates and characteristics, but our default dataset is based on the Bolshoi Simulation. These assets are combined using the cutting edge semi-analytic and semi-empirical techniques we use at the University of Southampton to build a mock universe; the result is a visually realistic galaxy catalogue for you to explore at your leisure.
Astera can render many millions of galaxies simultaneously. Fly though the cosmic web and witness the effects of the mysterious underlying distribution of dark matter firsthand. Experience the universe on the largest scales, in a structure that is composed of distinct galaxies.
Astera supports spiral galaxies, lenticular galaxies and the massive elliptical galaxies that reside in the centre of clusters. We have also introduced active galaxies, or AGN, which host a staggeringly bright accreting supermassive black hole. Each galaxy is represented by one of hundreds of hand-picked astronomical images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
To better show off large-scale structure, Astera offers a colour-inverted structure mode, which allows the cosmic web to be seen with unprecedented clarity.
A short demonstrational video of Astera in action can be downloaded here. You will probably have trouble streaming the video (because lots of small moving objects is really bad for video streaming); for the best experience, download the full mp4 and play it locally.
Chris Marsden
Chris Marsden is a PhD student at the Astronomy group and centre for Next Generation Computer Modelling (NGCM) at Southampton. Chris obtained his undergraduate at the University of Nottingham, and after two years in industry joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Southampton in 2017. His PhD explores the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies, with a specific expertise in advanced computational modelling. Chris is currently focussing on the (extremely challenging) modelling of velocity dispersion (the random motions of the stars in an elliptical galaxy) to better understand its mysterious relationship with the galaxy's supermassive black hole. He is also working with Francesco on the creation of cutting-edge AGN mock galaxy catalogues, which are of paramount importance to future missions such as Euclid, Athena and LSST. Chris is the lead developer behind Astera, the project being initially conceived as a simple video showing the extragalactic universe, but rapidly evolving into an ambitious real time rendering using Unreal Engine. He has demonstrated Astera at various events around Southampton, including at a TEDx talk.
Francesco Shankar
Francesco Shankar is Associate Professor in the Southampton Astronomy group. After obtaining his PhD at SISSA, he moved for a postdoc to the Ohio State University, to the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics as an Alexander von Hulmboldt Fellow, and then to the Observatoire de Paris as a Marie Curie Fellow. He then joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Southampton in 2013. His research revolves around the theoretical modelling of galaxies, their central supermassive black holes, and their host dark matter haloes. He pioneered in the phenomenological modelling of galaxies and black holes based on a combination of abundance matching and continuity equation techniques. He has now started a group in extra-galactic astronomy aimed at specifically constraining the evolutionary channels of early-type, bulged galaxies and supermassive black holes via advanced semi-empirical models. The increasing quantity of future data in extra-galactic Astronomy will have to be paralleled by fast modelling. The extreme flexibility and accuracy make semi-empirical models ideal tools to create full test catalogues for fast predictions and comparisons to data.
Tobias Grubenmann
Tobias Grubenmann is a Research Fellow at the Astronomy group at the University of Southampton. Tobias received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Zurich. After his PhD, he did two postdocs at The University of Hong Kong and the University of Bonn before moving to Southampton. He has a background in Mathematics, Computational Science (including the scientific simulation of gravitational interacting bodies), and Computer Science. Tobias is currently employed as an educational software developer and is actively developing the current Astera prototype. His responsibility is everything related to implementing the currnet game using the Unreal Engine 5. This includes programming the game logic, designing and implementing the UI, and designing and implementing the visual appearances of the galaxies. Tobias has experiences both in the Unreal Engine and in Unity3D, and various programming languages such as C/C++, C#, Python, and Java.