I like your comment, it provoked some catch-up reading, so forgive me pecking a bit at what you wrote.
The visualization is pretty limited, and was probably just a fun way for the astrophys student to use his choice of tools. (Which we should encourage! His work is great!)
Digging deeply into the consequences of this example of obviously physically improbable initial conditions could be somewhere between entertaining and enlightening, but would quickly go over the head of early astro students first encountering the virial theorem and negative heat capacity. "Getting the physics right" would be a significant research project. You'd also generally have to do without animations, unless you are very patient and have a big compute time budget (see the acknowledgments section of the MNRAS paper below, and my final paragraph).
Motivated by the previous paragraph's themes I found a recent (2022) MNRAS open access paper which among other things has a good overview of the (recent) state of the art in modelling star clusters, some good teaching material in section 2, and in section 3 we see their software packages. I'd suggest you begin with the summary in section 6.1.
In principle simulating the Spongebob cluster could produce information in the top two graphs of figure 7, and a 2d version of one or two of the graphs in figure 6. The additional information in those figures is certainly interesting, but nowhere near as pretty as the Spongebob animation. And I'm not sure what extracting similar figures for the Spongebob simulation would be useful for.
Conversely, the Spongebob simulation could not generate figure 9, and that figure is especially interesting to me (q.v. §4.2 & final sentence in §3.2).
And finally, "The movies of the full simulations, from which Fig. 6 was produced, will be made available upon reasonable request as well and will be uploaded publicly in the future". Not sure the upload ever happened, although I didn't really search much (e.g. it's not linked at the arxiv <https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.04470> or in DDG media searches on title or a few of the authors).
The visualization is pretty limited, and was probably just a fun way for the astrophys student to use his choice of tools. (Which we should encourage! His work is great!)
I am also not the only person to think the visualization would be useful when teaching early astro or astrophys undergrads. For example, <https://twitter.com/BenShappee/status/1769066245339402612>. (BTW, Shappee was in ASAS-SN from the start. ASAS-SN is awesome, I promote them whenever I can squeeze them in: <https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/asassn/index.shtml>).
Digging deeply into the consequences of this example of obviously physically improbable initial conditions could be somewhere between entertaining and enlightening, but would quickly go over the head of early astro students first encountering the virial theorem and negative heat capacity. "Getting the physics right" would be a significant research project. You'd also generally have to do without animations, unless you are very patient and have a big compute time budget (see the acknowledgments section of the MNRAS paper below, and my final paragraph).
Motivated by the previous paragraph's themes I found a recent (2022) MNRAS open access paper which among other things has a good overview of the (recent) state of the art in modelling star clusters, some good teaching material in section 2, and in section 3 we see their software packages. I'd suggest you begin with the summary in section 6.1.
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/516/3/3266/6668807
In principle simulating the Spongebob cluster could produce information in the top two graphs of figure 7, and a 2d version of one or two of the graphs in figure 6. The additional information in those figures is certainly interesting, but nowhere near as pretty as the Spongebob animation. And I'm not sure what extracting similar figures for the Spongebob simulation would be useful for.
Conversely, the Spongebob simulation could not generate figure 9, and that figure is especially interesting to me (q.v. §4.2 & final sentence in §3.2).
And finally, "The movies of the full simulations, from which Fig. 6 was produced, will be made available upon reasonable request as well and will be uploaded publicly in the future". Not sure the upload ever happened, although I didn't really search much (e.g. it's not linked at the arxiv <https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.04470> or in DDG media searches on title or a few of the authors).