The most comprehensive view simulation of its evolutionary course universe, starting shortly after its creation with the Big Bang before 13,8 billions of years and reaching to date, made a team of American and German astrophysicists and cosmologists, with the help of powerful supercomputers.
The most accurate model
It is the first time that the universe has been "so simulated" with such precision, which will, among other things, help control the credibility of various scientific theories about its origins and composition.
The new simulation-mammoth called "Illustris" is a kind of time engine, allowing scientists to see in a visual way what their equations have described over the years in the creation of stars and galaxies, especially in relation to the role of dark matter.
In essence, this is a sophisticated program software, which incorporates the basic cosmological theories and then takes it upon itself to recreate the "history" of the universe. The simulation starts "just" 12 million years after the Big Bang and follows the evolution of the universe until a cube 350 million light-years across is created in our time, containing 41.416 galaxies. The smallest structures shown in the simulation are about 1.000 light-years across.
Combined power
The whole work was published in the "Nature" Inspectorate and was headed by MIT's astrophysicist Mark Vogelsberg. The simulation gives for the first time a final result that seems to confirm the basic axioms of cosmology, as it agrees so much with astronomers' real observations through terrestrial and space telescopes - without, however, missing the differences between them, which must be explained in the future.
The new universal model was made possible by the combined processing power of several US and European supercomputers used. A simple laptop or desktop would need 2.000 years to run such a simulation. For the creation of the simulation, which is one of the most complex ones ever created for any reason and which uses 12 billions of pixels, it took three months of computational work, with the help of improved algorithms of "smart" software Arepo.
As Boeesselberg said, the simulation, among other things, highlights the determinant role of dark matter as a connective tissue and a "skeleton" around which the large structures of the galaxies come together. "If we did not include it, the simulation would not look like the real universe," he said. Simulation is also the first to show the visible matter to emerge from the dark.
It is estimated that the universe consists of about 4% of common matter, 23% of mysterious dark matter and 73% of - even more mysterious - dark energy.