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Virtual 'Universe Machine' Sheds Light on Galaxy Evolution


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supercomputer-generated universe

One of the millions of different universes a team of scientists generated on a supercomputer.

Credit: NASA, ESA, HFF Team

Researchers at the University of Arizona have used supercomputer simulations to understand how galaxies such as the Milky Way come into existence.

The researchers generated millions of different simulated universes on a supercomputer, each of which obeyed different physical theories for how galaxies should form. The team evaluated each simulated universe to determine how similar galaxies appeared compared to the true universe. The universes most like our own all had similar underlying physical rules, demonstrating a powerful new approach for studying galaxy formation.

The researchers utilized computing resources at the Ames Research Center, the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, and the "Ocelote" supercomputer at the UA High Performance Computing cluster. Two-thousand processors analyzed the data simultaneously over three weeks, generating more than eight million simulated universes.

From University of Arizona
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Abstracts Copyright © 2019 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA


 

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