You have probably seen the 3D models of the universe
showing the filamentary structure that hundreds of thousands of galaxies make at this scale. And you have undoubtedly marvelled at its scale.
If so, you ain't seen nothing yet. The galaxies in these maps are only those relatively close to Earth (a few hundred million light years away). But further away there are hundreds of millions of galaxies whose distance we have never accurately measured and so cannot include in these models.
That is set to change. In the next few years, astronomers expect to be inundated with huge volumes of data about how far away these galaxies lie.
But what to do with all this data? The plan is to build a virtual model of the entire universe that researchers can run forwards to see how the universe evolves in future or run backwards to examine how it came to be.
This kind of work will be crucial to understand the role of dark matter that holds galaxies together and dark energy which seems to be pushing the universe apart.
Scientists are preparing for this data deluge by testing the techniques needed to handle the vast amounts of information these models will hold. In 2005, Volker Springel from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany led an international collaboration to simulate the large scale structure of the universe. The project, called the Millennium Simulation
, involved 1010
And this week Enrique Gaztanaga at the Institut de Ciencies de l'Espai (IEEC/CSIC) in Spain and colleagues have used the MareNostrum
, the most powerful (and beautiful) supercomputer in Europe, to do a similarly-sized simulation involving 1011 particles
(pdf). The image (top, left) of the large-scale structure of a simulated universe comes from their data.
It's impressive and ambitious work. Simulations just don't get bigger than this.Justin Mullins, New Scientist contributorImage: Pablo Fosalba et al, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Labels: astronomy, simulation, supercomputer, universe