If you want to see how the universe expanded into what we
see today, or at least see a computer simulation of this process, you should
visit the
Illustris project.
Here is how
the site defiines the project:
The Illustris project is a set of large-scale cosmological
simulations, including the most ambitious simulation of galaxy formation yet
performed. The calculation tracks the expansion of the universe, the
gravitational pull of matter onto itself, the motion or
"hydrodynamics" of cosmic gas, as well as the formation of stars and
black holes. These physical components and processes are all modeled starting
from initial conditions resembling the very young universe 300,000 years after
the Big Bang and until the present day, spanning over 13.8 billion years of
cosmic evolution. The simulated volume contains tens of thousands of galaxies
captured in high-detail, covering a wide range of masses, rates of star
formation, shapes, sizes, and with properties that agree well with the galaxy
population observed in the real universe. We are currently working to make
detailed comparisons of our simulation box to these observed galaxy
populations, and some exciting promising results have already been published.
In an MIT press release, we learn about how this simulation is the first successful attempt to account for our current universe:
“For the past two decades, cosmologists have been unable to produce
galaxies like the Milky Way in their simulations,” says David Spergel, a
professor of astronomy at Princeton University. “We have long debated
whether this failure was due to complex dark matter physics, unknown
stellar feedbacks, or the difficulties in simulating the highly
non-linear multi-scale process of galaxy formation … With their
simulations, [the researchers] finally produce galaxies that look like
our own.”
And this is quite a project in terms of the scientists, computer resources, and sources of funding. The MIT press release noted that the paper, “Properties of galaxies reproduced by a hydrodynamic
simulation,” was co-written by 10 authors at several institutions: the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA); the Heidelberg
Institute for Theoretical Studies in Germany; the University of
Heidelberg; the Kavli Institute for Cosmology and the Institute of
Astronomy, both in Cambridge, England; the Space Telescope Science
Institute in Baltimore; and the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, N.J.
The computing centers used to run the simulation were the Harvard
Odyssey and CfA/ITC cluster; the Ranger and Stampede supercomputers at
the Texas Advanced Computing Center; the CURIE supercomputer at
CEA/France; and the SuperMUC computer at the Leibniz Computing Centre in
Germany.
Support for the research came from the German Research Foundation,
the European Research Council, NASA, and the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation in Germany.
Image Credit:
Illustris project
