Right now, a lot of the people watching this can’t easily see the night sky. To all of you watching on Now Media in Houston and Atlanta, you are awesome but your skies are not. 

The loss of dark night skies is a global problem, and it has made astronomers think long and hard about how they can create a universe in a box, but not just a universe that you can explore to see what is in the sky. Things like that exist; we recommend the software Stellarium. No, these researchers wanted to create a universe in a box that allows you to explore space and time and catch the details of how our reality has gone from a mostly smooth cloud of light and particles to the structured glory we see today. 

If you want to see the sky as it is, get Stellarium. If you want to explore space and time, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan has released Uchuu, which means “outer space”, the largest and most realistic simulation of the Universe to date. Containing 2.1 trillion particles that can evolve into everything we see, the computational cube they explore is 9.63 billion light-years on each side. Designed for researchers, this cloud-based simulation is free for all, and if you or your teenager are starting to think about science fair projects that combine space and computing, this model might be something to explore.

More Information

Center for Computational Astrophysics press release

“The Uchuu simulations: Data Release 1 and dark matter halo concentrations,” Tomoaki Ishiyama et al., 2021 June 22, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society