Spontaneously producing a statement is a messy affair.
Our Big Bang, for example, released the universe’s worth of energy and matter in an instant, then hurled it in all directions at the speed of light as the temperature of the ever-growing cosmos exceeded 1,000 trillion degrees Celsius in the first few nanoseconds of existence. The next few hundred million years, during which time the universe cooled to the point where particles beyond quarks and photons could exist — when real atoms like hydrogen and helium appeared — were known as the dark ages, because stars did not yet exist. to give light.
Eventually, however, enormous clouds of elemental gases compressed themselves to light, bringing illumination to the previously dark cosmos and fueling the combustion process. , which is why the universe is not just a bunch of hydrogen and helium atoms. The actual process for how the light from the new stars interacts with the surrounding gas cloud to create the ionized plasma that spawns the heavier elements is not fully understood, but a team of researchers that their mathematical model of this turbulent age is the largest and most detailed designed to date.
That simulation, named in honor of goddess of the dawn, simulating a period of cosmic reionization by observing the interactions between gas, gravity, and radiation in space 100 million cubic light-years away. Researchers were able to trace a synthetic timeline stretching from 400,000 years to 1 billion years after the Big Bang to see how changing different variables in the model impacted the results.
“Thesan acts as a bridge to the early universe,” Aaron Smith, NASA Einstein Fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said . “It is intended to be an ideal simulation partner for future observational facilities, which are poised to fundamentally change our understanding of the cosmos.”
–
It offers greater detail at a greater volume than previous simulations thanks to a new algorithm that tracks the interactions of light with gas corresponding to the formation of separate galaxies and models of the behavior of cosmic dust.
“Thesan followed how light from this first galaxy interacted with gas during the first billion years and turned the universe from neutral to ionized,” Rahul Kannan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who partnered with MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics on the project, said. say MIT News. “This way, we automatically follow the reionization process as it progresses.”
Driving this simulation is supercomputer in Garching, Germany. Its 60,000 compute cores run the equivalent of 30 million CPU hours in parallel to compute the numbers required by Thesan. The team has seen surprising results from the experiment as well.
“Thesan discovered that light did not travel long distances in the early universe,” Kannan said. “In fact, this distance is very small, and only becomes large at the end of reionization, increasing by a factor of 10 in just a few hundred million years.”
This means that light at the end of the reionization period travels further than the researchers previously thought. They also noticed that the type and mass of galaxies could influence the reionization process, although the Thesan team was quick to point out that corroborating real-world observations would be needed before the hypothesis was confirmed.
–
All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, regardless of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
