A team of international researchers have created a visual simulation of how the Universe evolved.
The simulation is the first of its kind to show in detail the emergence of galaxies. It traces 13 billion years of evolution starting 12 million years after the Big Bang.
The computer mode, called Illustris, covers a cosmic cube that is approximately 350 million light-years on each side, and focuses on some details that are usually difficult to calculate, according to SPACE.com.
It also shows how galaxies formed around clumps of an invisible substances commonly known as dark matter and dark energy, which makes up about 95 percent of the universe.
Research was published in the journal Nature this week.
Lead researcher, Dr. Mark Vogelsberger of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained in his study how this signifies where galaxies form.
"One of the main reasons why we did the simulation is because we learned a lot about the physics over the last years, and we think we have a very good understanding of the composition of the universe," Vogelsberger said to SPACE.com. "We think there is dark matter. We think there is dark energy and we think that there are ordinary atoms. We also think we have a pretty good understanding of the initial conditions of the universe because we can measure those with satellites."
The cosmic simulation was created by approximately 8,192 computer cores running at the same time. It isn't perfect, according to the study, but still offers new insights into our universe.
The simulation shows a time-lapse view of the universe moving into its current form in "brilliant colors," according to SPACE.com.
Though the new simulation doesn't account for the entire universe, Illustris does model a wide-enough part of the universe to be representative of the entire cosmos, Vogelsberger confirmed.
Vogelsberger and his colleagues were also able to model the way that baryonic matter, which is matter composed of protons, electrons and neutrons, behaves, according to SPACE.com.
"If all of these ingredients and all of these things that we think about the universe are correct, then with one big model, it should reproduce our universe," Vogelsberger said. "No one has tried that on this scale before and with that level of detail. (It's) a test of all our theories of how the universe should evolve and how the galaxies grow, in one go, essentially because we tested with one big model.
It would have taken approximately 2,000 years to create the same simulation when using one ordinary desktop computer, Vogelsberger said. Instead, it took just about six months for them to create the Illustris simulation by using a stable of computer cores.
"If the model would have gone very wrong and we did not produce what we see in the universe, then probably something about the composition of the universe would be wrong, or our understanding of how galaxies grow would be wrong, or something with the initial conditions would be wrong," he added.
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