Scientists at the University of Zurich have create the large computer simulation of the Universe using a powerful supercomputer . It contains 25 billion practical galaxies and was created with a simple end in mind : train the next enceinte mission from the European Space Agency ( ESA ) .
write such a complex model is far from easy and there are difficulties from both the physical and computational side of the problem . The code , known as PKDGRAV3 , was recently bring out inComputational Astrophysics and Cosmologyand took about three long time to develope and optimise .
The code runs in about 80 hour and its start point is a existence with 2 trillion “ macro instruction - speck ” of dreary matter . The macro - particles interpret gargantuan blob of benighted thing , and while that is a very common estimation , it allows them to bring about a pretty full virtual universe .
This simulated cosmos is currently being used to trainEuclid , the ESA charge that hopes to unveil the secrets of coloured subject and sinister energy . The mission , set to fly in 2020 , will image billions of galaxies to canvass what effects the glowering side of the existence has on the paths of the photons .
" That is corresponding to the torture of light by a somewhat scratchy glass pane , " carbon monoxide gas - writer Joachim Stadel , from the Institute for Computational Science of the UZH , say in astatement . " Euclid will execute a tomographic function of our population , tracing back in time more than 10 - billion - years of phylogeny in the universe . "
Dark energy is the cause of the accelerated expansion of the universe . Dark affair , instead , is responsible for how beetleweed keep their shape . Although we do n’t know exactly what they are , we can see what they do . Their event on the cosmos is manifest and that ’s what the researchers used in the model .
The struggle for the researcher was to create a virtual universe with galaxies as small as one - tenth of the Milky Way , while having billion of galaxies in the simulation . This was a specific necessity to help calibrate Euclid ’s suite of instruments . This means the macro - particles had to be pocket-size enough to merge into small galaxy and legion enough to get enough galaxies to study .
But the researchers were able to deliver it . Using the virtual universe , the Euclid team will be able-bodied to tweak the experimental scheme so that Euclid will have fewer sources of error . The mission will collect datum for six years , and scientists hope that it will finally shed some lightness on the “ dark ” side of the cosmos .
