Here’s a simulation that stretches the mind:
A massive simulation of the universe is digitally recreating the lives of stars, black holes and galaxies.
Richard Bower at Durham University in the UK and his colleagues have created a computer simulation approximately 1 billion light years across, which models tens of thousands of galaxies.
The team started the simulation on Tuesday and it will run continuously for 50 days across 30,000 computer processors developed by tech firm Intel in both Durham and Paris. It is 30 times larger than a previous simulation the team ran in 2015, which led to predictions about the mergers of supermassive black holes. [NewScientist, 23 November, paywall]
And the granularity?
The simulation studies galaxies by breaking them up into blocks of about 3000 light years. One of the team’s objectives is to try to understand rare objects in the universe, such as very distant galaxies that are invisible to telescopes that gather and focus visible light.
The Universe is a big place, to be sure. Estimates of our home galaxy of the Milky Way top out at a diameter of 250,000 light years, but the thickness of the disk is estimated at 2000 light years. Still, unless they’re using the old British definition of billion to be 1012, it’s a little hard to see this as harboring billions of galaxies. Or am I doing the math wrong?
In any case, I would have found doing this work fascinating. Between the logistical issues and the physics, it seems like a lot of fun.
And it reminds me of the old hypothesis, to which I have a certain inclination, that we are, ourselves, in and of a computer simulation. This is all getting fractal, isn’t it?
And here’s a picture of M-51, a spiral galaxy like our own, since I cannot show a picture of our own home, from NASA:
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Detlef Hartmann; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech
