The biggest and most detailed supercomputer simulation of the evolution of the Universe has been performed. The simulation mimics the Universe’s growth from a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang to the present day.
A key highlight was the production of quasars, which no previous model has been detailed enough to generate. The results of the so-called Millennium Simulation were released by the international group, the Virgo Consortium, on Wednesday.
“The Millennium Run gives us the most detailed and accurate theoretical prediction so far of the properties of galaxies and quasars, from the dawn of cosmic time to the present,” comments Nickolay Gnedin, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado, US, in an article accompanying the study in the journal Nature.
Animations and images from the simulation can be viewed here.
Quasars have long perplexed astrophysicists. The objects are points of light trillions of times brighter than the Sun and associated with supermassive black holes.
Their existence can be explained by a common model - the cold dark matter model – in which small objects gradually coalesce to form larger objects. But the first quasar formed just 850 million years after the big bang and astronomers feared this might be faster than the model allows.
However, the massive scale of the Millennium Simulation revealed that galaxies with supermassive black holes can in fact form early enough to host the first known quasars. The simulation produced a handful of quasars – enough to give the team confidence their simulation is mirroring reality reasonably well.
“Quasars are very rare,” says lead author Volker Springel, with the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. “So you need a simulation that’s very big to actually find one of them.”
Previous simulations of the evolution of the Universe have been limited by the virtual volume they were able to model, as well as uncertainty of some critical aspects of the physics behind galaxy formation.
The Millennium Simulation used 10 billion particles, 10 times more than similar earlier simulations, to track the evolution of 20 million galaxies over the history of the universe. The simulation required the processing of 25 terabytes of information – equivalent to about 3000 DVDs.
Journal reference: Nature (vol 435, p 629)
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