Astronomers have developed the most detailed and realistic simulation of the universe ever produced. The simulation gives you a unique perspective on the universe’s past and presents on size and in detail that has never been seen before, and you can download it for free if you want to.
The simulation is known as Uchuu, according to the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Notices (meaning “outer space” in Japanese). The virtual universe is confined in a cube with 9.63 billion light-years on each side and 2.1 trillion particles on each side.
While this isn’t enough to simulate planets and individual stars, it does allow an international team of researchers to mimic galaxy interactions in astonishing detail. This type of realistic simulation allows us to put our beliefs about the cosmos to the test. Evidence implies that the cosmos is dominated by two mysterious components at the moment. Only 5% of the entire content is made up of the stuff that made us famous. Dark matter, an invisible substance that surrounds galaxies, accounts for 25% of the total, while dark energy, which is thought to be responsible for the universe’s accelerated expansion, accounts for the remaining 25%.
Astronomers can use Uchuu to see how the proportions of these distinct components affect the universe’s structures. The simulation spans 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang and includes the formation of galaxies and galactic clusters.
“Uchuu is like a time machine: we can go forward, backward, and stop in time; we can “zoom in” on a single galaxy or “zoom-out” to visualize a whole cluster; we can see what is really happening at every instant and in every place of the universe from its earliest days to the present,” Julia F. Ereza, a graduate researcher at the Instituto de Astrofsica, says.
Uchuu was constructed using the ATERUI II supercomputer, which is regarded as the best in the world for astronomy.
“We employed all 40,200 processors (CPU cores) available exclusively for 48 hours each month to create Uchuu. Twenty million supercomputer hours were used, resulting in 3 petabytes of data, or the equivalent of 894,784,853 photos taken with a 12-megapixel phone “Tomoaki Ishiyama, an associate professor at Chiba University, is the principal author. Uchuu was created using code created by Ishiyama.
