Scientists rely on a two-pronged approach to understanding evolution. To study the earliest periods of the Universe, astronomy uses advanced instruments to look farther and farther into space. Scientists try to model how the Universe has evolved by using simulations. When the two match up, they know they are on the right track.
Increasingly accurate simulations have been made using increasingly sophisticated supercomputers. The most accurate simulations to date were conducted by an international team of researchers. The simulations accurately predicted the evolution of our corner of the universe.
The team was made up of researchers from the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) and the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy at Durham University. The results of the team are published in the monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The first study conducted as part of the Simulations Beyond the Local Universe project was performed using a distributed computer network. The simulation covers a volume of space up to a distance of 600 million light-years from Earth and is represented by over 130 billion simulations, which took thousands of computers several weeks to produce.
The team used known physics to explain how dark matter and gas evolved. They wanted to know if what we observe is in line with the standard model of cosmology. For the past few decades, this model has been used to explain the properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Random patches of the Universe have been modeled in previous simulations. These simulations were conditioned to reproduce our patch of the Universe. The team was able to see if their simulation reproduced the structures that have been observed for decades.
They compared the virtual Universe to a series of surveys and found that the simulation matched the locations and properties of structures like the Great Wall.
The co-author of the book is Professor Carlos Frenk.
“It is immensely exciting to see the familiar structures that we know exist around us emerge from a computer calculation. The simulations simply reveal the consequences of the laws of physics acting on the dark matter and cosmic gas throughout the 13.7 billion years that our universe has been around.
“The fact that we have been able to reproduce these familiar structures provides impressive support for the standard Cold Dark Matter model and tells us that we are on the right track to understand the evolution of the entire Universe.”
The prediction that our patch of the Universe has fewer galaxies on average due to a large-scale matter under density is interesting. This is a very important test for the model.
Dr. Stuart McAlpine, a former PhD student at Durham and a current researcher at the University of Helsinki, said that by simulating our Universe, we are one step closer to understanding the nature of our cosmos. The bridge between theory and observations is provided by this project.
The international team plans to analyze the simulation in order to provide more stringent tests of the model.
Further reading: RAS
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