Despite huge advances in technology, no single computer model simulation has been able to recreate the complexity of the start and evolution of the universe. Until now.

Astronomers of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced in the journal Nature today the results of a three-month long computer process culminating in a model known as "Illustris".  It was completed in late 2013 but the results were being published only now.

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The process involved 8,000 individual CPUs all running in parallel in order to model the known universe. To put these numbers in perspective, if the same simulation was carried out on a single home desktop computer, it would take around 2,000 years to recreate.

With visuals difficult to distinguish from real observations, Illustris can appear reminiscent of the new hit TV-show on Fox, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which also charts the history of the universe. But whereas the documentary show is an artistic representation, Illustris is a comprehensive simulation, using theories culled from decades of astronomical observations. Importantly, Illustris is also allowed to evolve with time as new theories arise in the future.

Previous similar work were either too low in resolution or focused only on tiny portions of the cosmos. Illustris is instead based on the entire universe as a 3D model, 350 million light-years across. It simulates the movements and evolution of all planets and stars over the past 13.8 billion years, starting 12 million years after the Big Bang.

The Illustris model shows the first matter pooling together to form the first stars and galaxies and eventually planets. It allows scientists to zoom in on specific areas and allows researchers to focus on different mechanisms of space. Co-author Shy Genel described Illustris as a "time machine", allowing astronomers to go back and forth through time and pause to see what went on, throughout the long history of the universe.

The invisible so-called dark matter and dark energy are also included in the calculations, both of which are believed to make up the majority of all matter in the universe but has yet to be observed directly. The dark matter anchors the clusters of stars and galaxies in what is visualized in the simulation as a "cosmic web" of the invisible stuff.

Given the large-scale nature of the work and the sheer amount of equations interacting in all kinds of ways, some anomalies in the simulation differ notably from observations, raising new questions for astronomers to answer about how the cosmos works.

TagsComputer Simulation, Universe, Astronomy, Illustris, Harvard, Smithsonian, Center for Astrophysics, Astrophysics