Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) Harvard University

New information on the role gravity plays in the formation of stars has emerged with the help of the IIC’s Astronomical Medicine project, which has applied visualization techniques from medical imaging to challenges in astronomy.

The work is described in a HarvardScience news release and in a Letter in a special January 1, 2009 issue of the journal Nature launching the Year of Astronomy. The authors include Alyssa Goodman, founding director of the IIC, IIC Senior Scientist Michael Halle, IIC Postdoctoral Fellow Jens Kauffmann and IIC Researcher Michelle Borkin, now a graduate student in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Scineces.

The IIC team and Goodman’s colleagues in astronomy used a dendrogram to elucidate the hierarchical structure within the giant molecular clouds that are major star-forming regions in space. To communicate the results, Halle and Kauffmann collaborated with other technical specialists to create the first three-dimensional interactive PDF published by Nature. Key figures in the article present data in a form in which readers can experience multiple views of all or part of the data as they read the paper, without needing special software.

An interactive PDF showing some of the team’s data can be downloaded here.