Tuesday 24 October 2023 / 19:00
Astronomers have run the largest “supercomputer” simulations ever, from the Big Bang to the present day, to help answer some of the universe’s biggest mysteries.
The goal is to compare the virtual universe with what we know about the real world, including new information captured by high-powered telescopes, which sometimes doesn’t quite match what is expected.
This can help scientists understand whether the current theory of how the universe evolved, known as the Standard Model of cosmology, is a good description of reality.
The project, called “Flamingo,” calculated the evolution of all components of the universe, including ordinary matter, dark matter and dark energy, according to the laws of physics.
Professor Carlos Frenk, a collaborating researcher on the “Flamingo” project, from Durham University, said: “Cosmology is at a crossroads, and we now have amazing new data from powerful telescopes, some of which, at first glance, does not match our theoretical expectations.”
“High-resolution simulations of the universe should be able to tell us the answer,” he added.
Previous simulations, which have been compared to observations of the universe, have focused on cold dark matter, which is thought to be a major component of the structure of the universe. However, astronomers now say that the influence of ordinary matter, which makes up only 16% of all matter in the universe, including the Earth and everyone on it, and neutrinos, which are small particles that rarely interact with ordinary matter, must also be taken into account when trying to… Understanding the evolution of the universe.
The researchers have been running simulations on a powerful supercomputer in Durham for the past two years. The simulations took more than 50 million processing hours on the COSMA 8 supercomputer, hosted by the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, on behalf of the Dirac High Performance Computing facility in the UK.
Funding for the project came from the European Research Council, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.Metro“Electronic.”
