This is supposed to be the largest simulation ever seen

Even with the first images, the James Webb Space Telescope has caused irritation in science. This means that galaxies could have formed after the Big Bang much faster than expected – that is, earlier than expected according to the standard cosmological model.

The expansion of the universe also appears to be progressing faster than expected for a universe that is 13.8 billion years old. So far, inconsistencies can be eliminated by assuming errors in monitoring and evaluation and adjusting formulas, e.g writes spektrum.de.

Naturally, the scientific community does not want to leave this alone and wait for more data that they can examine. On the other hand, researchers from Great Britain and the Netherlands want to shed light on the origins and expansion of the universe through the largest cosmic simulation to date.

As part of the so-called Flamingo project (Large-scale full-water structure simulations with all-sky mapping to interpret next-generation observations) In addition to dark matter, visible matter and neutrinos should also be included more strongly in the calculations.

According to astronomers, the effects of visible matter, which makes up only 16% of all matter in the universe, and neutrinos could improve our understanding of the evolution of the universe. This may explain possible deviations from the standard model.

For Carlos Frenk, professor of physics at Durham University, cosmology is at a crossroads. “We have amazing new data from powerful telescopes, some of which at first glance does not match our theoretical expectations.” Quoted Independent physicist.

Consequently, either the Standard Model of cosmology is flawed or there are small distortions in the observed data. “High-resolution simulations of the universe should be able to give us the answer,” Frink says.

Over the past two years, researchers at Durham University have run similar simulations on a supercomputer called Cosma 8.

The largest of these involved the use of 300 billion particles, each equivalent to the mass of a small galaxy, in a cube-like space (cube), the length of the edges of each of which corresponds to ten billion light-years. This is said to be the largest cosmological computer simulation of ordinary matter ever.

In the future, astronomers will be able to use machine learning to predict the evolution of any hypothetical universe — and learn more about its cosmological parameters, says the Royal Astronomical Society. he is called.

In total, the calculations consumed 50 million processor hours. The researchers built their own code using Swift, enabling them to distribute computing tasks across thousands of central processing units (CPUs). Meanwhile, there were up to 65,000 CPUs in use at the same time.

Details about the Flamingo project Published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.