To succeed in astronomy, you really need to either be really really good with technology, or really really good at math. I personally am a technology person, and I’ll happily operate telescopes and write software, but I’d really not do the seemingly endless juggling of variables and constants that goes into theoretical work. Luckily, there are actually folks out there with both the aptitude for maths and for computing, and it is one collaboration of these folks who have just brought us the new, highest-resolution model of our universe and its evolution over time.
This work is described in 3 papers in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that address methods, the simulations results, and a comparison of those results with our reality.
This is one of the first models to consider both Cold Dark Matter, which is the primary component of our Universe, and also regular baryonic matter like we’re made of, and neutrinos… which honestly… aren’t exactly regular matter, and also aren’t cold dark matter.
Past models left out regular matter because it is effected by gas laws and particles can build up into structures and otherwise interact in ways that are just a lot more complicated. It was hoped that adding a richer diversity of materials would bring the models into enough alignment with reality that we can start to understand why our measurements of the physics driving the universe’s expansion are inconsistent when we look at the early universe and modern universe.
While this simulation – called FLAMINGO – does better than past simulations at matching our universe, it still doesn’t have the level of detail needed to know where our understanding goes wrong. It’s a start however, and the improvements being seen indicate we’re on the right track. It allows us to track how the temperatures of gas, distribution of dark matter, and emission of X-Ray light all track together, and how effects like galactic winds play their own part.
To do better, we’re going to need more powerful computers… I can only hope that with the constant advance of processor speeds, simulations like FLAMINGO will soon allows to go “OH – that’s where our equations are missing something” and figure out what factors are actually forcing apart our expanding universe.