As the Universe unfolds right in front of us, we can’t help but wonder: what’s really like up there? How do things merge one with another, and why? We’re now closer to some answers than ever, thanks to a new ‘invention.’
A team of researchers developed a full virtual Universe and is now available for free. How great is that?
Curious to find out more?
Virtually Closer to the Entire Universe
Researchers from Japan came up with quite the development. They generated an entire virtual Universe dubbed Uchuu, meaning “outer space” in Japanese.
The virtual Universe is the biggest and most realistic simulation of the Universe so far. Here’s why.
Uchuu Features
The virtual Universe includes 2.1 trillion particles in a computational cube, an unparalleled 9.63 billion light-years alone. What does this mean?
That amount is approximately three-quarters the length between our planet and the most distant observed galaxies. How great is that?
Uchuu shows the evolution of the Universe on a scale of detail and size never seen before. It also focuses on the large-scale stuff, such as the peculiar halos of dark matter that rules the galaxies and the fate of the Universe. And that ranges from the biggest galaxy clusters to the smallest galaxies.
Researchers explained that we wouldn’t find any alien civilization in the virtual Universe, so don’t get your hopes too high!
Check out the following video to understand the time evolution of dark matter structures in the virtual Universe:
“Uchuu is like a time machine: we can go forward, backward and stop in time, we can ‘zoom in’ on a single galaxy or ‘zoom out’ to vizualize a whole cluster, we can see what is really happening at every instant and in every place of the Universe,” explained Julia F. Ereza, a Ph.D. student at IAA-CSIC.
If you want to download Uchuu, you should know that researchers used high-performance computational methods to compress data on the evolution and formation of dark matter haloes into a 100-terabyte catalog, available on the cloud for free.
