Scientists Develop the Most Detailed Model of the Early Universe

Researchers at the University of Austin in Texas have created a new computer model of the epoch of reionization. They modeled the universe as it was 600 million years after the Big Bang. At that time, the homogeneous medium was filled with ultraviolet radiation, which ionized matter. The first stars were born, and began to assemble into galaxies.

It is very difficult to study this process, because little relict radiation has survived since then. That's why research is mostly done on models. The last one consists of 81,923 dark matter particles and the same number of gas and radiation cells in a region 300 million light-years across today.

In order to perform such a large-scale project, 24,576 graphics and 131,072 ordinary processors connected to the Summit supercomputer were used. The calculation process took 10 days.