The infant universe transforms from a featureless landscape to an intricate web in a new supercomputer simulation of the cosmos’s formative years.
A simulation animation shows the universe evolving from a flat, cold cloud of gas to the lumpy scattering galaxies stars we see today. It’s the most complete, detailed and accurate reproduction of the universe’s evolutionResearchers report in November that they have not yet produced the product. Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society.
This virtual glimpse into the cosmos’s past is the result of CoDaIII, the third iteration of the Cosmic Dawn Project, which traces the history of the universe, beginning with the “cosmic dark ages” about 10 million years after the Big Bang. Paul Shapiro, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, said that hot gas from the beginning of time (13.8 billion years ago) had cooled to a cloud without any light.
Approximately 100 million years later. There are tiny ripples left in the gas from the Big Bang.Gases clumped together (SN: 2/19/15). This resulted in long, thread-like strands which formed a web made of matter that was used to create galaxies as well as stars.
As radiation from the early galaxies illuminated the universe, it ripped electrons from atoms in the once-cold gas clouds during a period called the Epoche of reionizationIt continued to about 700 million years after Big Bang.SN: 2/6/17).
Shapiro claims that CoDaIII was the first simulation to accurately account for the complex interaction of radiation and the flow matter in the universe. It covers the period from the cosmic dark ages to the next several hundred billion years, when the distribution of matter in our modern universe began.
The animation from the simulation, Shapiro says, graphically shows how the structure of the early universe is “imprinted on the galaxies today, which remember their youth, or their birth or their ancestors from the epoch of reionization.”
