Just today, researchers at the Durham University in the UK released the first computer model of how the Universe must have looked only 500 million years after the Big Bang, right at the time when the first stars and black holes began to take shape. The “Cosmic Dawn” is the name used to describe the formation of the first and earliest galaxies, which brought light in an otherwise pitch-black and cold space. Experts from the University's Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) have been behind the new simulation, and they hope that their design will help astrophysicists improve their level of knowledge and expertise on the elusive dark matter.
The calculations made by the ICC team also hint at the fact that the first galaxies were formed from the remnants of supermassive blue stars, which died explosively once they consumed their fuel. From the “ashes” of these enormous celestial bodies, galaxies started taking shape, as gas and dust were channeled to their central core on filaments of dark energy, according to some theories. At the same time, black holes formed from the same original stars, and they began to impose a circular motion to the objects that were gathered around them.
The new study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and founded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the European Commission, relies on a complex and very sophisticated computer model that accounts for everything, from the way structures would grow in dark matter to how regular matter such as gas behaves, which has allowed the machines to predict the development of galaxies.
“We are effectively looking back in time and, by doing so, we hope to learn how galaxies like our own were made and to understand more about dark matter. The presence of dark matter is the key to building galaxies – without dark matter we wouldn’t be here today,” Alvaro Orsi, an ICC research postgraduate and the lead author of the new paper, explains.
“Our research predicts which galaxies are growing through the formation of stars at different times in the history of the Universe, and how these relate to the dark matter. We give the computer what we think is the recipe for galaxy formation, and we see what is produced, which is then tested against observations of real galaxies,” ICC Royal Society Research Fellow Dr Carlton Baugh, who is also the co-author of the newly-published study, adds.
“Computational cosmology plays an important part in our understanding of the Universe. Not only do these simulations allow us to look back in time to the early Universe, but they complement the work and observations of our astronomers,” Chief Executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council professor Keith Mason concludes.
Find us on Google+
