A twisting, rolling cloud of smoke, hundreds of thousands of light years wide. Each second of this video represents 98,540,145 years.

Ever wonder what NASA uses all those supercomputers for? In part, for running simulations like this:

From NASA, this simulations "follows the development of a single disk galaxy over about 13.5 billion years, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present time." That's about

Old stars are colored red, younger ones are white and blue. Gas is pale blue.