2023-10-26 18:45:16
Astronomers have carried out the largest computer simulation ever of the evolution of the universe, spanning from the Big Bang to the present day, aimed at investigating how the universe has evolved.
Through various sessions, the FLAMINGO simulation calculates the evolution of all components of the universe, including ordinary matter, neutrinos, dark matter and dark energy, based on the known laws of physics. As each version of each stage of the simulation progresses, galaxies and galaxy clusters emerge in great detail.
The FLAMINGO team is made up of scientists from Liverpool John Moores University, Durham University and Leiden University, the first two in the United Kingdom and the third in the Netherlands.
These scientists trust that the simulation will allow comparison of the virtual universe with observations of the real one captured by new high-power telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope.
This could help discern whether the standard model of cosmology, used to explain the evolution of the universe, provides a good description of reality.
The first studies based on FLAMINGO have recently been published in the academic journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
A projection through a slice 130 million light-years thick, in a simulation session centered on a cubic volume 9.132 million light-years on a side. (Image: Josh Borrow / FLAMINGO team / Virgo Consortium. CC BY)
FLAMINGO simulation sessions have been running for the past two years on the COSMA 8 (Cosmology Machine 8) supercomputer, hosted at the Institute of Computer Cosmology at Durham University. The sessions have consumed a total of more than 50 million processor hours.
To make FLAMINGO possible, researchers developed a new computer code, called SWIFT, that effectively distributes computational work across thousands of central processing units (CPUs), sometimes as many as 65,000.
The large amount of (virtual) data created by simulation sessions offers opportunities to make new theoretical discoveries and test new data analysis techniques, including machine learning (a form of artificial intelligence).
During the simulation sessions, the team, including Roi Kugel from Leiden University and Carlos Frenk from the Institute of Computational Cosmology at Durham University, used different resolutions and also different versions of other factors such as strength of galactic winds and the mass of neutrinos. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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