For all the scientific advancements made in the last few centuries, many parts of the universe, including stories of its origin and early days, remain a mystery for the human imagination. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is only one among many of the powerful observatories that have helped create models of what the earliest galaxies might have looked like. The latest supercomputed simulations are simply the latest addition to this bundle.
Given their credibility in filling many of our knowledge gaps, a team of international researchers has managed to successfully develop one of the most detailed models of the universe yet as per a recent study published in the scientific journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Titled ‘Lumina’, the new simulation recreates a pivotal yet enigmatic phase of transformation by depicting how the first stars and black holes drove reionization. Soon after the big bang, ultraviolet radiation from these early light sources stripped electrons from hydrogen atoms, the most common element in space, allowing light to travel farther and changing how galaxies were formed.
Light’s nature of taking ample time to travel through space has allowed powerful telescopes to capture galaxies as they were billions of years ago. This technical ability feeds the curiosity of astronomers eager to decipher how the universe came to be into its current form. Large models like Lumina fuel such curiosity by allowing astronomers to study long stretches of cosmic history on similarly large scales. The varied movement of dark matter and ordinary matter through space can also be studied. Beyond functionality, the feat of creating the ‘Lumina’ in and of itself is no less than a scientific marvel.
As per lead author Oliver Zier, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Lumina is capable of covering more than 100 times as much space as earlier simulations. More than 15,000 graphics processing units of Frontier, a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, took nearly three years of computing power to create the massive model. As per NASA, the Lumina spans roughly 1.5 billion light-years across in each direction in comparison to the Milky Way which is about 100,000 light-years wide.
Also Read I ‘Watching them never gets old’: NASA astronaut shares rare view of red and green auroras Due to disparities in the evolution of the early universe, the Lumina allows researchers to simultaneously study how different regions shifted over time.
