The most comprehensive visual simulation of the evolutionary course of the universe, starting shortly after its creation with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago and reaching the present day, was carried out by a team of American and German astrophysicists and cosmologists, with the help of powerful supercomputers.
The most accurate model
It is the first time that the universe has been "modeled" with such great accuracy, which, among other things, will help test the reliability of various scientific theories regarding its origin and composition.
The new mammoth simulation called "Illustris" is a kind of time machine, allowing scientists to see in a visual way what their equations have been describing for years, regarding the creation of stars and galaxies, especially in relation to the role of dark matter.
In essence, it is a sophisticated software program that incorporates the basic cosmological theories and then takes it upon itself to recreate the “history” of the universe. The simulation starts “just” 12 million years after the Big Bang and follows the evolution of the universe until a cube with a side of 350 million light years is created in our time, which contains 41,416 galaxies. The smallest structures shown by the simulation are about 1,000 light years across.
Combined power
The entire work, published in the journal Nature and led by astrophysicist Mark Vogelsberger of MIT, provides for the first time a final result that appears to confirm the basic axioms of cosmology, as it agrees so closely with the actual observations of astronomers through ground-based and space-based telescopes - without, however, missing the differences between them, something that must be explained in the future.
The new universe model was made possible thanks to the combined processing power of several American and European supercomputers. A simple laptop or desktop computer would take 2,000 years to “run” such a simulation. The simulation, which is one of the most complex ever created for any reason and which uses 12 billion 3D pixels, took three months of computing work, with the help of improved algorithms of the “smart” Arepo software.
As Vogelsberger said, the simulation, among other things, highlights the crucial role of dark matter as the connective tissue and “skeleton” around which the large structures of galaxies are articulated. “If we didn’t include it, the simulation wouldn’t look like the real universe,” he said. The simulation is also the first to show visible matter emerging from dark matter.
It is estimated that the universe consists of about 4% ordinary matter, 23% of the mysterious dark matter and 73% of the even more mysterious dark energy.
