For the First Time, We Have a Detailed Model of the Universe

The model, reported today in the journal Nature, also takes us back to aaaaalmost the origin of the universe—just 12 million years after the Big Bang. And that’s where the time machine component comes into play. Since light travels at a fixed speed, Illustris gives astronomers the ability to correlate light with time (so, say, a galaxy that’s a billion light-years away will look to us like it did a billion years ago). That’s an important new capability. While the Hubble and similar space telescopes allow us to gaze on the early universe, Illustris lets us follow a single galaxy as it evolves over time.

With Illustris, paper co-author Shy Genel explains it, “We can go forward and backward in time. We can pause the simulation and zoom into a single galaxy or galaxy cluster to see what's really going on.”

Illustris has 41,000 galaxies in its simulation—a mix of spiral galaxies like our Milky Way along with elliptical galaxies. It represents five years of work on the part of the scientists from, among others, the MIT/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in Germany. And it exists now in large part because computing technology has finally caught up with our aspirations for understanding the workings of the universe.

The calculations required to create the model took 3 full months of run time, using a total of 8,000 CPUs.

Had those calculations been done on on average desktop computer, the paper notes, the calculations would have taken more than 2,000 years to complete.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/for-the-first-time-we-have-a-full-virtual-model-of-the-universe/361945/