It amazes me sometimes the speed with which things appear on the Internets. It's only been minutes since New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie made his announcement that he's not running for President, and this collection of cat pics with Christie captions was tweeted out by the cool kids at Buzzfeed. These are my favorites, but you can see them all by clicking here.
And today's Awesome Internets is a twofer. In addition to the fun that can be had with politics and cats... please to enjoy some awesomely geeky space stuff. Below is a video showing how the Milky Way galaxy (that one's ours) and our neighbors likely formed. It was produced with the findings of the Bolshoi Cosmological Simulation.
Formation of the Milky Way and its Neighbors from Risa Wechsler on Vimeo.
The Bolshoi Simulation, as explained by The University of California Santa Cruz, is "... the most accurate cosmological simulation of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe yet made ('bolshoi' is the Russian word for 'great” or 'grand')." So the entire 14 billion year evolution of the the universe in one massive supercomputer simulation. So. Freaking. Cool.
The new collection of videos was made using information from the supercomputer simulation and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. There's an entire collection of videos here on the Bolshoi Simulation website or here from io9 (this second link includes a fascinating half-hour video lecture if you're reeeeally interested).