Astronomers have revealed a fascinating simulation of the early universe, which was filled with amazing cosmic flashes, about 13 billion years ago.
The simulation, created by experts at MIT and Harvard University, shows the universe’s transformation from a completely dark place to a radiant environment filled with light.
This period, known as the epoch of reionization, was an event marking the demise of the “dark ages” of the universe, when there were no galaxies, stars, or planets.
The new simulations were created using one of the world’s largest supercomputers, SuperMUC-NG, which ran nearly 30 million hours of operations, across its CPU, and the simulations themselves would have required more than 3,500 years to complete on a regular computer.
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The stunning video is part of a large set of simulations described in a series of three papers accepted in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The simulations are named Thesan, after the Etruscan goddess of dawn.
“Most astronomers do not have laboratories in which to conduct experiments,” said Rahul Kenan, an astrophysicist at Harvard University’s Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the first paper.
He added: “The scales of space and time are very large, so the only way we can do experiments is on computers, and we are able to take basic physics equations, and the governing theoretical models to simulate, what happened in the early universe.”
Thesan follows how the light from these first galaxies interacted with gas over the first billion years, transforming the universe from neutral to ionizing in this way.
The universe began about 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang – a cosmic explosion that created the universe. Soon after, the early universe cooled dramatically, becoming completely dark, filled with a hot, dense, dark mist of ionized gas, before galaxies formed stars and planets.