A multinational team of scientists has produced the most accurate simulation yet of the universe’s early beginnings. Below, you can view a video simulation of reionization, an event that occurred 13 billion years ago, when the first light began to spread over the cosmos.
When light diffused over the cosmos, the first galaxies were born during this time period as hydrogen atoms ionized. This Thesan simulation took on the task of capturing the chaos and complexity of this time period.
For the first billion years following the Big Bang, the team developed the most comprehensive simulation yet, encompassing an area of 300 million light-years and spanning the first billion years.
“The visibility of high-redshift Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies (LAEs) provides important constraints on galaxy formation processes and the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). However, predicting realistic and representative statistics for comparison with observations represents a significant challenge in the context of large-volume cosmological simulations. The THESAN project offers a unique framework for addressing such limitations by combining state-of-the-art galaxy formation (IllustrisTNG) and dust models with the AREPO-RT radiation-magneto-hydrodynamics solver. In this initial study, we present Lyman-alpha centric analysis for the flagship simulation that resolves atomic cooling haloes throughout a (95.5 cMpc)3 region of the Universe,” reads the study’s abstract.
So long ago, it was almost impossible to find documentation of this event. Observing faraway galaxies with advanced telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is like going back in time since light takes time to traverse such distances. Newer telescopes are expected to provide data that researchers can compare with their simulations, so researchers are optimistic.
They’ve come up with a simulation that provides the most comprehensive perspective of cosmic reionization yet seen in a computer simulation. Most of today’s modeling tools can either simulate big areas at low resolution or provide more complex simulations that don’t really cover large areas.
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