Cosmologists have a more difficult time studying their subject: the universe- than some other occupations of study. Unlike studying say, geology, the universe is more difficult to get into the lab. Now, scientists have created a program that utilizes 25 million megabytes to simulate the initial condition of the universe and let it move foward given our known scientific parameters.

A story in the Guardian Unlimited reports on The Millennium Simulation saying that it required 25 million megabytes of memory to take our universe’s initial conditions along with the known laws of physics to create this simulated universe.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1497195,00.html

From the article:

The simulated universe represents a cube of creation with sides that measure 2bn light years. It is home to 20m galaxies, large and small. It has been designed to answer questions about the past, but it offers the tantalising opportunity to fast-forward in time to the slow death of the galaxies, billions of years from now.

Prof Frenk said: “We programmed the biggest computer in Europe with these ingredients and the laws of physics and we just let it compute a universe. We let it churn away – in fact we shut down all science in Germany, we excluded all German science for a month while this very large machine ground away – and at the end we got this beautiful universe, which for all intents and purposes looks like the real thing.

Unfortunately, at 25 million megabytes, the home version is not available yet.

The Virgo consortium, an international group of astrophysicists from the UK, Germany, Japan, Canada and the USA has today (June 2nd) released first results from the largest and most realistic simulation ever of the growth of cosmic structure and the formation of galaxies and quasars. In a paper published in Nature, the Virgo Consortium shows how comparing such simulated data to large observational surveys can reveal the physical processes underlying the build-up of real galaxies and black holes.

(http://www.pparc.ac.uk/Nw/millennium_sim.asp)

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