We just got something pretty close to a baby photo of the universe. A team of astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian has created the most detailed simulation yet of the universe in its infancy, giving us a virtual look at how the cosmos evolved during its first two billion years.
Called Lumina, the simulation was created through a collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard College Observatory. It starts with a cube of space stretching about 1.5 billion light-years across and follows the universe as its earliest ingredients began turning into the structures we recognize today.
The universe before the universe
At around 1.5 billion years old, the universe wasn’t exactly the polished cosmic neighborhood we are familiar with now. Instead, it was filled with delicate filaments of dark matter and glowing gas. Those ingredients, along with light and fast-moving particles, gradually interacted to create the early structures of the cosmos.
Lumina lets scientists watch that process unfold rather than simply trying to reconstruct it from today’s universe. “We feel incredibly fortunate to be building simulations like Lumina,” said Dr. Aaron Smith, a physicist at the University of Texas at Dallas and co-author of the study.
“For the first time, we can follow along as both hydrogen and helium changed into their modern form across such an enormous volume of the universe, while still resolving the galaxies and other luminous objects driving that transformation,” he added.
Your computer would absolutely hate this thing
Creating Lumina required some serious computing power. Researchers used more than 15,000 graphics processing units running on Frontier, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
That computational muscle allowed the team to simulate a volume of space more than 100 times larger than previous models while still maintaining enough detail to show individual galaxies and black holes forming.
Can a simulation predict the early universe?
Scientists can compare Lumina’s predictions with what telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope are actually seeing in the distant universe. If these simulated galaxies, gas and other structures line up with telescope observations, it gives researchers more confidence that their understanding of how the early universe evolved is on the right track. If something doesn’t match, it could at least point scientists toward gaps in existing theories or even suggest that some assumptions about the universe need to be reconsidered.
As Oliver Zier, the study’s lead author and a computational physicist with the Center for Astrophysics, said, “The early universe has become an exciting new frontier in astrophysics.”
Sources: The New York Post, LBV