Astronomers Create Universe Simulator Named Illustris

Posted on May 8, 2014

Astronomers have built a universe simulator named Illustris. Illustris is the most detailed computer simulation of our universe ever built. The computer program uses 12 billion 3-D pixels. The astronomers say Illustris can recreate "13 billion years of cosmic evolution in a cube 350 million light-years on a side with unprecedented resolution." The research team spent five years to developing the Illustris program. The actual calculations took 3 months of "run time," using a total of 8,000 CPUs running in parallel. The astronomers say if they had used an average desktop computer, the calculations would have taken over 2,000 years to complete.

The computer simulation began a mere 12 million years after the Big Bang. When it reached the present day, astronomers counted more than 41,000 galaxies in the cube of simulated space. Take a look:

Lead author Mark Vogelsberger. MIT/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says in the announcement, "Until now, no single simulation was able to reproduce the universe on both large and small scales simultaneously."

Shy Genel of the CfA, co-author of the study, says, "Illustris is like a time machine. We can go forward and backward in time. We can pause the simulation and zoom into a single galaxy or galaxy cluster to see what's really going on."

The results of the simulation are being reported here in the May 8th issue of the journal Nature.

SPACE