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The evolution of the universe perfectly reproduced by a supercomputer

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This is the most complete, detailed and accurate reproduction of the evolution of the universe that has ever been made, researchers report in November’s Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This virtual glimpse into the cosmos’ past is the result of CoDaIII , the third iteration of the Cosmic Dawn project, which traces the history of the universe, starting with the “cosmic dark ages,” some 10 million years after the Big Bang. By then, the hot gas produced about 13.8 billion years ago had cooled into a featureless and lightless cloud, says astronomer Paul Shapiro of the University of Texas at Austin.

About 100 million years later, tiny ripples in the gas, left behind by the Big Bang, caused the gases to clump together. Thus long threadlike filaments were formed which went to form a network of matter in which galaxies and stars were born.

 

CoDaIIIit’s the first simulation that fully takes into account the complicated interaction between radiation and the flow of matter in the universe, Shapiro says. The simulation spans the time span from the Dark Ages of the cosmos to the next several billion years, when the distribution of matter in the modern universe was formed. The animation of the simulation, explains Shapiro, graphically shows how the structure of the early universe is “imprinted in today’s galaxies, which recall their youth, their birth or their ancestors of the era of reionization (understood as the moment in which the enormous mass of neutral hydrogen, which permeated the primordial universe in its first million years of life, vanishes thus allowing the light to filter in order to make celestial bodies observable) “.

 

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  • The short ionizing photon mean free path at z = 6 in Cosmic Dawn III, a new fully coupled radiation-hydrodynamical simulation of the Epoch of Reionization Get access Arrow. (academic.oup.com)
  • A new supercomputer simulation animates the evolution of the universe. (sciencenews.org)
 

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