The entire history of the Universe reconstructed through a great computer simulation: here is the “Illustris Simulation”!
One of the two images presented below is the famous “Hubble Ultra-Deep Field” image, showing more than 10 000 galaxies in an area of the sky comparable to one twentieth of the nail of our little finger. While the other image is the result of a great computer simulation, the “Illustris Simulation” (published in 2014). It was the first simulation of the entire history of the universe, starting just 12 million years after the Big Bang, to have successfully reproduced the numerical density, colors, sizes and morphologies of the galaxies observed by Hubble today.
Which one of these pictures is the “Hubble Ultra-Deep Field”?
Very difficult to guess on the spot, as the two images are really similar. It was a huge job, which required months of calculation using the most powerful super-computers in the world (an excellent modern personal computer would have taken 2000 years to perform the same amount of calculations!), through which the authors achieved for the first time this extraordinary result. All this is indicative of how much our understanding of the Universe have made greatly progressed over the decades. However, as you can guess, we stay hungry and want to know even more. In fact, there are still many open questions waiting for an answer, the research continues.
P.S. If you want to enjoy the simulation in a video, from the origins of the universe till today, and have some more details…
References:
“Properties of galaxies reproduced by a hydrodynamic simulation“, Vogelsberger, Genel, Springel, Torrey, Sijacki, Xu, Snyder, Bird, Nelson, Hernquist, Nature 509, 177-182 (08 May 2014) doi:10.1038/nature13316
