Release of the largest and most detailed universe simulation software to date
Contains 2.1 trillion particles spanning 9.63 billion light years
Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, September 14 (Reporter Liu Xia) According to the US Daily Science website, an international research team composed of scientists from Japan, Spain, the United States, Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, and Italy uses the world’s The most powerful astronomical supercomputer, ATERUI II, took a year to develop Uchuu, the largest and most detailed universe simulation software to date, and provide it to everyone for free.
Uchuu can also help astronomers interpret the results of large-scale galaxy surveys, and is expected to play an important role in the field of astronomy.
Uchuu (meaning "outer space" in Japanese) contains 2.1 trillion particles and spans a distance of 9.63 billion light-years, allowing scientists to study the evolution of the universe at a size and detail that has never been imagined.
Uchuu focuses on the large-scale structure of the universe: the mysterious dark matter halo.
Dark matter not only controls the formation of galaxies, but also controls the fate of the entire universe itself.
Uchuu's accuracy is high enough to allow scientists to identify all the details, from clusters of galaxies to dark matter halos of individual galaxies.
However, Uchuu is currently unable to resolve the details of individual stars and planets.
Compared with other virtual universe software, the secret of Uchuu's standout is its long span time. Uchuu simulated the evolution of matter in the universe from the Big Bang to the present 13.8 billion years.
Dr. Julia Elza from the Institute of Astrophysics in Andalusia, Spain, used Uchuu to study the large-scale structure of the universe. She explained: “Uchuu is like a time machine. We can move forward, back, and stay in time. , We can "zoom in" a single galaxy or "shrink" an entire cluster of galaxies. We can see what happens at every moment and every place in the universe from the beginning of the universe to the present. It is a basic tool for studying the universe. "
For the convenience of researchers and the public, the research team used high-performance computing technology to compress the information about the formation and evolution of dark matter halos in the Uchuu simulation into a 100 terabyte catalog.
The catalog is now available to everyone on the cloud in an easy-to-use format.
In the future, the research team will release data including virtual galaxy catalogs and gravitational lens maps.
The researchers pointed out that Uchuu will help astronomers interpret data from large-scale galaxy surveys such as Japan’s Subaru telescope and the European Space Agency’s Euclid space mission in the next few years.
Associate Professor Ishiyama Tomaki (transliteration) of Chiba University in Japan developed the code used to generate Uchuu. He explained: “To create Uchuu, we used 40,200 processors. The supercomputer worked for 20 million hours in total. 3 petabytes of data."