Secrets of the Dark Universe: Simulating the Sky on the Blue Gene/Q, The Outer Rim Simulation
Hal Finkel, Kalyan Kumaran, Adrian Pope, David Daniel, Zarija Lukić · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 2013
An astonishing 99.6% of our Universe is dark. Observations indicate that the Universe consists of 70% of a mysterious dark energy and 25% of a yet-unidentified dark matter component, and only 0.4% of the remaining ordinary matter is visible. Understanding the physics of this dark sector is the foremost challenge in cosmology today. Sophisticated simulations of the evolution of the Universe play a crucial task in this endeavor. This movie shows an intermediate stage in a large simulation of the distribution of matter in the Universe, the so-called cosmic web, accounting for the influence of dark energy. The simulation is evolving 1.1 trillion particles. The movie shows a snapshot of the Universe when it was 1.6 billion years old.