Astrophysicists Develop “Time Machine” Simulations To Observe the Lifecycle of Ancestor Galaxy Cities

Scientists have produced simulations that directly recreate the complete life cycle of a few of the biggest collections of galaxies observed.

Several processes in astrophysics take a very long time, making their evolution tricky to study. A star like our sun has a lifespan of around 10 billion years, and galaxies evolve for billions of years.

Astrophysicists deal with this by looking at different objects to compare them at different stages of evolution. They can also look at distant objects to effectively peer back in time because of the time the light is required to travel to reach our telescopes. If we are looking at an object 10 billion light-years away, we see it as it was 10 billion years ago.

Now, for the first time, scientists have produced simulations that directly recreate the complete life cycle of a few of the biggest collections of galaxies observed in the distant universe 11 billion years ago, reports a new study released on June 2, 2022, in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Cosmological simulations

Cosmological simulations are critical to examining how the universe became the shape it is today. However, many do not commonly match what astronomers observe via telescopes.

Most are created to match the real universe just in a statistical sense. Alternatively, constricted cosmological simulations are designed to replicate the structures directly we, in fact, observe in the universe. Nevertheless, many existing simulations of this kind have actually been applied to our local universe, meaning near to Earth, but never for observations of the distant universe.

A team of researchers, led by Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe Project Researcher and first author Metin Ata and Project Assistant Professor Khee-Gan Lee, were interested in distant structures like substantial galaxy protoclusters, which are ancestors of present-day galaxy clusters before they could lump under their own gravity. They discovered present research of distant protoclusters was, in some cases, oversimplified, suggesting they were done with simple models and not simulations.

“We wished to try establishing a full simulation of the actual distant universe to see exactly how structures began and how they finished,” stated Ata.

Their outcome was COSTCO (COnstrained Simulations of The Cosmos Field).

The Cosmos through a time machine

Lee claimed that developing the simulation was much like constructing a time machine. Due to the fact that light from the distant universe is only getting to Earth now, the galaxies telescopes observe today are a snapshot of the past.

“It is like discovering an old black-and-white photo of your grandfather and making a video of his life,” he claimed.

In this sense, the scientists took pictures of “young” grandparent galaxies in the universe and then fast-forwarded their age to research how clusters of galaxies would form.

The light from galaxies the scientists utilized traveled a distance of 11 billion light-years to reach us.

What was most difficult was taking the large environment into account.

“This is something that is really vital for the fate of those structures, whether they are isolated or associated with a larger structure. If you do not take the environment into account, after that, you get completely different answers. We managed to take the large-scale environment right into account consistently because we have a full simulation, which is why our prediction is more stable,” stated Ata.

Other applications

Another important reason the scientists developed these simulations was to test the standard model of cosmology that is utilized to describe the universe’s physics. Scientists can reveal previously unnoticed disparities in our existing understanding of the universe by predicting the final mass and distribution of structures in a given space.

Utilizing their simulations, the researchers discovered proof of 3 currently published galaxy protoclusters and disfavor one structure. They were able to recognize five more structures that were continually created in their simulations. This includes the Hyperion proto-supercluster, the largest and earliest proto-supercluster recognized today that is 5000 times the mass of our Milky Way galaxy, which the scientists found out will certainly collapse right into a large 300 million light-year filament.

Read the original on Scitech Daily.

Read more: Hyper Burst” Nuclear Explosion Observed for the First Time in a Neutron Star.