We can finally explore the entire universe in detail without even leaving the house after a virtual simulation was made available to everyone on the cloud.
It is the largest and most realistic version ever made, consisting of 2.1 trillion particles in a computational cube that is 9.6 billion light years across.
The simulation is called Uchuu, which is Japanese for “outer space”, and allows us to fully study the large-scale structure of the universe in more detail than ever before.
This is naturally blowing everyone’s minds and some excited people took to Reddit to share their amazement at the work.
One impressed commenter said: “This is incredible, and now just imagine the sheer volume of data it's missing ... this universe is incomprehensibly large to us in terms of size and matter.”
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Another fan of the virtual program added: “it looks like a brain's neural network, so wild.”
Although one person raised a valid and eerie concern, saying: “What if we got a signal from the simulation, ‘we come in peace’.”
It’s a scary thought that extraterrestrial life could be stumbled upon through the simulation but fear not, the individual stars and planets aren’t resolved so alien civilizations won’t pop up in the program.
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One particular way in which Uchuu differs from other virtual systems is that it also simulates the evolution of matter over almost the entire history of the universe - from the Big Bang all the way to the present… 13.8 billion years of time!
Julia F. Ereza, a Ph.D. student at IAA-CSIC told NAOJ: “Uchuu is like a time machine: we can go forward, backward and stop in time, we can ‘zoom in’ on a single galaxy or ‘zoom out’ to visualize a whole cluster, we can see what is really happening at every instant and in every place of the Universe from its earliest days to the present, being an essential tool to study the Cosmos.”
The simulation will help astronomers to interpret results from Big Data galaxy surveys.
And it’s expected that surveys which will benefit from the help of Uchuu in the coming years will come from things like the Subaru Telescope and the European Space Agency Euclid space mission, which launched last July to explore the composition and evolution of dark matter.
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It’s pretty cool to think that this free to use simulation will help us to better understand our universe.