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Scientists Just Created The Best Simulation Of The Universe Ever

In Archive, News, Science & Technology on May 8, 2014 at 2:41 AM



Illustris Collaboration

This large-scale picture of the universe, created by Illustris, shows clouds of cold gas where stars are formed (green), warmer gas (blue), and hot regions around galaxies (red).


The details were published in a paper on May 7 in the journal Nature.

Modeling Challenges

Creating a realistic model of the universe has long been a struggle for cosmologists. One problem is that the universe is mostly composed of dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious substances that scientists can’t directly observe or measure, but that are thought to give all the stars and galaxies in our universe their underlying structure. Only 5% of the universe is made up of matter we can see.

Generating an accurate picture of something we don’t yet fully understand is challenging for obvious reasons, but cosmologists have found that modeling visible matter is just as, if not more, difficult. That’s because a simulation that captures the evolution of the universe from its early history to present day requires scientists to use a huge range of scales — starting from the very small physical scales that describe the evolution of gas and individual stars to the larger scales that are needed to show the formation and distribution of galaxies.

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The simulation models both the stars and the galaxies that we can see and the dark matter that we can’t see — but that makes up 95% of the universe.

The universe was created during the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. But there are many questions about how galaxies and stars evolved between then and now. That’s why scientists use computer models to fill in the billion of years between the birth of the universe and what we observe today.

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The universe burst into existence 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang. But scientists are still trying to understand how cosmic features evolved between then and present day.

A Virtual Universe




galaxy evolution.gif


Illustris captured the huge scales of the universe.



“Images of galaxies from the simulation are also impressively realistic, an accomplishment that has previously been possible only for simulation of individual galaxies,” Michael Boylan-Kolchin, an astronomer at the University of Maryland, said in a news article published by Nature.

Images of the simulated galaxy population “appear strikingly similar” to real images of galaxies observed by the Hubble Space Telescope “in terms of number density, colors, sizes, and morphologies,” the authors wrote in their paper.

The simulation is not perfect, the study noted, but it “does represent a significant step forward in modeling galaxy formation.” Check out the video:

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