From Big Bang to 2bn years - We now know what the universe looked like

Scientists have created a simulation of the universe as it would have existed barely two billion years after the Big Bang. This is the most detailed reconstruction of the universe in its infancy. The Lumina model has been devised by the Center for Astrophysics, which shows how the universe evolved over two billion years.

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard College Observatory collaborated on the project and released a video showing the universe as a cube 1.5 billion light-years long in its earliest stage. At this stage, it was filled with fine filaments of dark matter and luminous gas.

Smithsonian Magazine reported that these structures joined together with light and the fast-moving volatiles over billions of years to form the early structures of the universe. This is the first time scientists have created such a detailed and clear image of how the cosmos changed over the years in its initial years.

Model shows huge volume of the universe changing

Co-author Dr Aaron Smith, a physicist from the University of Texas at Dallas, said, "For the first time, we can follow along as both hydrogen and helium changed into their modern form across such an enormous volume of the universe, while still resolving the galaxies and other luminous objects driving that transformation." The paper has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Frontier, one of the fastest supercomputers on Earth, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, was used to create the simulation. Over 15,000 graphics processing units ran on the supercomputer to reveal an expanse of the cosmos which is over 100 times the volume of what Lumina’s predecessors were able to achieve.

The simulation will be compared with data from the James Webb Space Telescope and other devices that can peer billions of years back in time. This creation will help researchers know whether the current theories on the universe’s laws require any changes.