Movies rendered directly from our simulations, many with the help of the
SPLASH
visualization software (Price 2007).
A head-on impact at 3,500 km/s
A direct hit transfers mass between the stars and leaves one stripped survivor. From Gibson et al. 2025.
Two stars in a high-speed grazing collision
A grazing collision at 5,000 km/s near a galactic center. Both stars survive, but each is stripped of its outer layers. From Gibson et al. 2025.
A hit-and-run between stars
At 6,000 km/s the stars barely touch, yet one is left permanently stripped. From Gibson et al. 2025.
The making of a blue straggler
Two ordinary cluster stars collide and merge into a heavier, seemingly younger star. This simulation, by Alexander Brown '09 and Lombardi, was featured on the History Channel series The Universe.
Inside a stellar collision
A cross-section through the orbital plane as two stars collide; colors show the density of the gas.
Two red giants merge
Twin red giants orbiting just inside the stability limit shed mass and spiral together. From Lombardi et al. 2011.
A neutron star captures a companion
A neutron star plows through a bloated subgiant star, the first step toward an ultracompact X-ray binary.
Giants collide in a young cluster
A 53 and an 18 solar mass star collide in a runaway merger sequence that may build intermediate-mass black holes.
A black hole meets a red giant
A stellar-mass black hole collides with a red giant and strips away its envelope, leaving the star's dense core bound to the black hole in a compact binary, a route to the black hole–white dwarf X-ray binaries seen in globular clusters. From Yang et al. 2026.