New Supercomputer Simulation Maps First Two Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution
Researchers have created the Lumina simulation, covering a volume over 100 times larger than previous models, to study the formation of early stars, galaxies and reionization.
An international team has released Lumina, a supercomputer simulation that recreates the universe’s first two billion years, including the emergence of the first stars and black holes and the reionization era. The study appears in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Lumina spans a region about 1.5 billion light-years across, roughly 100 times larger than earlier simulations, allowing researchers to view the large-scale cosmic web while also resolving individual galaxies. Lead author Oliver Zier, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the model provides a “cosmological volume where you can see this cosmic web, how galaxies are clustered. At the same time, we resolve individual galaxies.”
The simulation was run on Frontier, a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, using more than 15,000 graphics processing units over nearly three years. Although the full data set is not yet public, video visualizations demonstrate the contrast between vast cosmic structures and the small scale of individual galaxies.
Scientists plan to compare Lumina’s output with observations from telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope. Zier noted that agreement would strengthen existing theories, while discrepancies could point to missing physics.
Julian Muñoz, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the work, called the simulation “a really impressive technical achievement” and highlighted its larger size and longer simulated time compared with earlier models. He added that the scale enables study of how ordinary matter and dark matter moved differently in the early universe.
Ilian Iliev, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Sussex, said the model could help identify rare galaxies that smaller simulations might overlook and look forward to combining its results with new telescope data to improve the overall picture of early cosmic history.