Living Earth Simulator Project

Transcription

We've built a Universe Matrix, and we did it without Keanu. It's everything astronomical scientists could ever want. Which has led them, inexorably, here. Howdy y'all, Trace here for DNews with your weekly space update! We've done it! We've created a computer simulated universe using 13 billion years, 41,000 galaxies, 350 million light-years wide -- this simulation is the largest most accurate EVER and ... what is it for again? Scientists have gathered reams of information on our universe over the last few centuries, how it moves, interconnects, reacts, grows and changes. We have theories about how it was formed, how parts of it die, and how things behave! But they're scattered through tons of books, papers and human brains. This stimulated universe, called "Illustris," is a way to put ALL these theories in one place and run experiments to check if these vast hypotheses are correct. This is like a SimUniverse game... the researchers can go forward or backward in time, from 12 million years after The Big Bang, all the way to what we can see today. As time flies in the simulation, scientists can track the formation of galaxies and follow how we think the universe came to be. This has been REALLY tough to create before now because our understanding of dark energy and dark matter is a HUGE variable. That dark stuff makes up 95% of the universe, so getting it right in the simulation without ever directly observing it is pretty tough, but the guys at MIT where the simulation lives are confident. The best part about this simulation is the tracking of the big stuff, like spiral and elliptical galaxies, and small stuff like protons, electrons and neutrons. Seriously, that's all in there. It takes a supercomputer to run it. It uses 8,192 CPUs to render the graphics for the simulator and it took six months to chug through all 13 billion years. All this aside, these scientists aren't perfect, and they know their amazing computer program isn't perfect either, but it's a huge step toward understanding how galaxies form and interact. Each particle of gas in the simulator is 1 MILLION SOLAR MASSES -- like one million suns. Like early digital cameras, it's tough to pick up ALL the details when you take a picture -- but that doesn't mean you can't see the image. Scientists are already finding things wrong and calling them out, because science -- we're not afraid to be wrong. This lil SimUniverse doesn't form low-mass galaxy stars at the right time and they can't model massive galaxy clusters -- but that's due to minimum computer requirements. Dammit. Time to get a new graphics card... or 8,129 of them. If you had eight thousands computers what kind of science would you want to simulate? Tell us in the comments and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss a DNews. Two episodes, every day! For more space stuff check out DiscoveryNews.com and watch more DNews. You can connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else! See ya!