Have you ever dreamed of witnessing the birth of the first galaxies? Perhaps you could fast-forward through billions of years of the evolution of the universe and watch those galaxies grow and form the universe we know today? Of course, unfortunately that’s not possible. But thanks to an innovative new and unique audio-visual simulation of the “virtual universe”, scientists have developed the best picture of cosmic evolution to date, and you can see and hear it too.
“It’s refreshing to see ‘galaxies’ come out of the computer that are indistinguishable from the real thing, and share many of the properties that astronomers measure in real data, including their number, brightness, color and size,” said COLIBRE team member Carlos Frenk. stated in a statement. “I like to tease my fellow observers and ask them, ‘Which galaxy catalog do you think these images came from?’ Most notably, we can create this synthetic universe purely by solving the relevant physical equations in an expanding universe.”
The simulations were run on Durham University’s COSMA8 supercomputer and overcame a challenge that others had found insurmountable: cold gas modeling. But this modeling difficulty has been a problem because stars are formed when cold gas and dust collapse under their own gravity. To accurately simulate stars, we need to be able to accurately simulate the motion of cold gas. COLIBRE was also able to simulate small dust particles and their impact on blocking ultraviolet light, which helps form hydrogen molecules and prevents the cooling of gas and the birth of stars.
“Much of the gas in real galaxies is cold and dusty, but most previous large-scale simulations have had to ignore this,” COLIBRE leader Joop Schaye of Leiden University in the Netherlands said in a statement. “With COLIBRE, we have finally delivered on these critical components.”
But while synthetic universes are great, there’s one cosmic puzzle revealed by JWST that remains unanswered. These are the so-called “little red dots” that this instrument has seen in large numbers at one point in cosmic time.
That may be because these mysterious objects (which appeared in large numbers 600 million years after the Big Bang, but disappeared when the universe was around 1.5 billion years old) are heavy. black hole seed.
Most of the simulations were completed in 2025, but some are still running and analysis of the data already provided will take years.
“We’re excited not just about the science, but also about creating new ways to explore science,” James Trayford of the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the development of COLIBRE’s dust model and the sonification of its visualization, said in a statement. “These tools may provide new insights, make our field more accessible, and help build intuition about how galaxies grow and evolve.”
The COLIBRE study was published Monday (April 13) in the journal Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices.
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