Atlantis Online
March 29, 2024, 08:01:57 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Underwater caves off Yucatan yield three old skeletons—remains date to 11,000 B.C.
http://www.edgarcayce.org/am/11,000b.c.yucata.html
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

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

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: For the First Time, We Have a Detailed Model of the Universe  (Read 203 times)
0 Members and 40 Guests are viewing this topic.
Cylon
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 2727



« on: May 08, 2014, 09:05:44 pm »

For the First Time, We Have a Detailed Model of the Universe
And its rendering stretches almost all the way back to the Big Bang.
Megan Garber May 8 2014, 1:31 PM ET


Composite image from the Illustris simulation (Illustris Collaboration)

It is, if you except the powers of human memory, the closest thing we have to a time machine.

Scientists have created the first realistic model of the universe, capable of recreating 13 billion years of cosmic evolution. The simulation is called “Illustris,” and it renders the universe as a cube (350 million light-years on each side) with, its creators say, unprecedented resolution: The virtual universe uses 12 billion 3-D “pixels,” or resolution elements, to create its rendering. And that rendering includes both normal matter and dark matter.

The rendering, importantly, also includes elliptical and spiral galaxies—bodies that, because of numerical inaccuracies and incomplete physical models, we'd been unable to see with such detail in previous simulations of the universe. It also does a better job than previous renderings of modeling the feedback from star formation, supernova explosions, and supermassive black holes.
Report Spam   Logged

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

Cylon
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 2727



« Reply #1 on: May 08, 2014, 09:07:04 pm »

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/
Report Spam   Logged
Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy