Chapter 19: \(\Lambda\)-CDM Simulations

Two videos are contained below:

TheĀ Millennium RunĀ used more than 10 billion particles to trace the evolution of the matter distribution in a cubic region of the Universe over 2 billion light-years on a side. It kept busy the principal supercomputer at the Max Planck Society’s Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany for more than a month. By applying sophisticated modelling techniques to the 25 Tbytes of stored output, Virgo scientists have been able to recreate evolutionary histories both for the 20 million or so galaxies which populate this enormous volume and for the supermassive black holes which occasionally power quasars at their hearts. By comparing such simulated data to large observational surveys, one can clarify the physical processes underlying the buildup of real galaxies and black holes.

A 3-dimensional visualization of the Millennium Simulation. The movie shows a journey through the simulated universe. On the way, we visit a rich cluster of galaxies and fly around it. During the two minutes of the movie, we travel a distance for which light would need more than 2.4 billion years. Credit: Springel et al. (2005)
https://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/millennium/index.shtml

The universe was a cold, dark place 10 million years after the Big Bang. Hydrogen gas began to clump together 100 million years later, forming dense regions (white) that gave birth to the first stars and galaxies, as seen in this animation from a new simulation of the early universe. Light radiating from the stars (blue) heated the gas around the galaxies as matter collected in a weblike arrangement. The pink bursts are high-temperature regions that appeared as some stars exploded. The galaxies and stars we see today lie along the filaments that resulted from the complicated interplay between matter and starlight as the universe evolved.

Video: P. Ocvirk/Observatoire astronomique de Strasbourg, Paul Shapiro/The University of Texas at Austin/The Cosmic Dawn & CLUES Collaborations, Summit/Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility
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