Our Universe was nothing but a sea of swirling gas.
The Universe was a billion years old. Light was able to stream freely across the entire spectrum because of the radiation from the first stars and galaxies.
Thesan is a simulation that allows scientists to look at the Dark Ages. It is a new way to see in detail how the lights may have turned on. It is absolutely beautiful.
Thesan acts as a bridge to the early Universe and is intended to serve as an ideal simulation counterpart for upcoming observational facilities.
Most of what we know about the Universe is learned from light. When light is hindered, it causes a lot of problems, so just look at black holes, which do not emit radiation.
The early Universe is between 50 million and 1 billion years after the Big bang. The Cosmic Dawn was the time when the Universe was just starting to coalesce out of the primordial plasma. It was filled with ionized gas before the first stars came along. Light could not travel through the fog because it scattered off free electrons.
After the Universe cooled down, protons and electrons recombine into neutral hydrogen atoms. Light could travel through space. The neutral hydrogen in the Universe was reionized by the ultraviolet light of the first stars and galaxies. This is the history of reionization.
The Cosmic Dawn is difficult to understand because we can't really see with our current instruments.
Most astronomer don't have labs to conduct experiments in. The scales of space and time are too large, so the only way we can do experiments is on computers, according to an astronomer from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
We can use basic physics equations and governing theoretical models to model what happened in the early Universe.
Thesan starts with a realistic model of galaxy formation, along with a new method for reproducing how light interacts with and reionizes the ambient gas and a model of cosmic dust.
The team used a powerful machine to run the simulations, which took 30 million hours to complete.
The simulation captures physics on scales a million times smaller than the simulation regions, which is the most detailed view yet of the Epoch of Reionization. This gives an unprecedented look at the way early galaxies formed and interacted with the gas of the early Universe. Light begins to trickle through the Universe.
When you put it in the freezer, it takes time, but after a while it starts to freeze on the edges and slowly creeps in.
Thesan showed that initially light does not travel very far. Light is able to travel large distances at the end of reionization. The team was able to see which types of galaxies had the biggest influence on reionization.
We will find out how accurate the simulation is soon. The James Webb Space Telescope is due to begin science operations in a few months, and is partially designed to peer back to 300,000 years after the Big bang.
Physicist Mark Vogelsberger of MIT said that it was the interesting part.
Either our Thesan simulations and model will agree with what JWST finds, which would confirm our picture of the Universe, or there will be a significant disagreement showing that our understanding of the early Universe is wrong.
We are going to learn a lot about the birth and early years of our amazing Universe.
The research has been published.
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