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It’s a cosmic baby photo.
Astronomers have managed to construct the most detailed simulation yet of our universe in its infancy.
Devised by the Center for Astrophysics, the Lumina model shows how the cosmos evolved in the first two billion years following the Big Bang, the Telegraph reported.
A video of this primordial recreation, the product of a collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard College Observatory, begins with the universe as a cube 1.5 billion light-years long.
To astronomers’ knowledge, this is what the universe looked like when it was just 1.5 billion years old, during which it was filled with fine filaments of dark matter and luminous gas.
These cosmic precursors wove together with light and the fast-moving volatiles over billions of years to form the early structures of the universe, Smithsonian Magazine reported.
“We feel incredibly fortunate to be building simulations like Lumina,” said Dr. Aaron Smith, a physicist from the University of Texas at Dallas and co-author of a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “For the first time, we can follow along as both hydrogen and helium changed into their modern form across such an enormous volume of the universe, while still resolving the galaxies and other luminous objects driving that transformation.”
By mapping the cosmos’ embryonic stage, the scientists managed to put the somewhat ethereal theories of the cosmos’ metamorphosis to pixels in never-before-seen detail.
Bringing this microcosmos to life involved using over 15,000 graphics processing units running on Frontier, one of the fastest supercomputers on Earth, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Using this incredible tool, researchers were able to cover an unprecedented expanse of the cosmos — over 100 times the volume of Lumina’s predecessors — while showing the formation of individual galaxies and black holes.
Most importantly, researchers will be able to cross-reference Lumina’s predictions with observations by the James Webb Space Telescope and other cosmic optical devices.
This celestial cross-referencing will allow scientists to gauge whether their theories on the universe’s laws are accurate or require revision.
“The early universe has become an exciting new frontier in astrophysics,” said the study’s head author Oliver Zier, a computational physicist with the Center for Astrophysics, of the Il-Lumina-ting model. “After several years of work, with plenty of ups and downs, it is incredibly rewarding to see the simulation results and watch our predictions come to life.”
He added, “To understand what we are seeing with this telescope, we need to translate our theories into detailed predictions.”