Technology Trends

It’s not the first time I’m mentioning the Virgo Consortium and how it is dedicated to look at the early stages of our universe (read here or there). But now, the Telegraph, U.K., tells us that these astrophysicists have completed the Millennium Run simulation which shows how our universe was looking 13.7 billion years ago. And if like me, you like big numbers, the whole simulation is the result of 500,000 trillion calculations done at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics which adds that their supercomputer simulation explains the formation of galaxies and quasars just after the Big Bang. Read more…

These opening paragraphs of the Telegraph article will give you an idea of the size of this simulation.

It is the result of 500,000,000,000,000,000 (500,000 trillion) calculations made by one of the biggest supercomputers in Europe after it was given information on the current composition of the universe, the microwave radiation left over after the Big Bang and the laws of physics.

The ultra-high-resolution simulation was created by tracking 10 billion particles of dark matter, the mysterious and invisible material that spreads out across the universe in gigantic strands, through the evolution process.

They focused on the evolution of a cubic region measuring two billion light years on each side — about 0.5 per cent of the universe — from just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang until the present.

You’ll find many images and movies on this page. This particular picture shows a large-scale light distribution in the Universe (Credit: Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics). And if you’re interested, you’ll also find a huge version of the poster of the Millennium Run in A0 format — for 280 MB.

The Max Planck Institute gives additional details about the simulation.

The Virgo consortium, an international group of astrophysicists from Germany, the UK, Canada and the USA has just released first results from the largest simulation ever of cosmic structure growth and of galaxy and quasar formation.

This “Millennium Run” used more than 10 billion particles to trace the evolution of the matter distribution in a cubic region of the Universe over 2 billion light-years on a side. It kept busy the principal supercomputer at the Max Planck Society’s Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany for more than a month.

By applying sophisticated modelling techniques to the 25 Tbytes of stored output, Virgo scientists are able recreate evolutionary histories both for the 20 million or so galaxies which populate this enormous volume and for the supermassive black holes which occasionally power quasars at their hearts.

The research work makes the cover story of the June 2 issue of Nature under the title “Evolution of the universe.”

Here is a link to the abstract of the Virgo paper, “Simulations of the formation, evolution and clustering of galaxies and quasars,” which “shows how comparing such simulated data to large observational surveys can clarify the physical processes underlying the buildup of real galaxies and black holes,” according to the Max Planck Institute.

Sources: Nic Fleming, Telegrapgh.co.uk, June 2, 2005; Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics Press Release, June 2, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Astronomy
  
  
• Physics
  
  
• Space
  
  
• Supercomputers