Humans have long tried to explain how stars came to light up the night sky. The wide array of theories throughout history have one common (and correct) governing principle that astrophysicists still use to this day: by understanding the stars and their origins, we learn more about where we come from.
However, the vastness of our galaxy—let alone our entire universe—means experiments to understand our origins are expensive, difficult, and time consuming. In fact, experiments are impossible for studying certain aspects of astrophysics, meaning that in order to gain greater insight into how galaxies formed, researchers rely on supercomputing.
