Shader Showcase: Megaparsecs

My attempt at a spiral galaxy. Made from a bunch of ellipses.

I got the idea when I read about new theories concerning spiral galaxy formation. The standard idea of the spiral arms just orbiting around the center doesn't work because it would 'wind up' the spiral with every rotation. This would very quickly (on cosmological scales) lead the spirals to would wind up to the point where they'd dissapear. This is not what we observe so a different theory is needed. One such theory, called desnity wave theory, is that we are actually looking at lots of overlapping and rotated elliptical orbits, which I tried to emulate here.

Playing around with this made me realize that a galaxy is just a big vortex of dust, where every dust particle is a star! I threw in some super big & bright stars to make for a more interesting image. There is also the occasional supernova thrown in. Though in reality super novae happen in our galaxy about once every 50 years and since one orbit takes about 250 million years it should have about 150,000 super nova flashes per second if we look at it at this time-scale!

Twitter: @The_ArtOfCode Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/theartofcode/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheArtOfCode ShaderToy: https://www.shadertoy.com/user/BigWIngs PayPal Donation: https://paypal.me/theartofcode

Live version: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/WsyBDz

Music: Yearning by Michael fk - Artlist ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaRCG5Ek1sc