The Millennium Simulation is a large-scale simulation of the universe’s development, created by the Virgo Consortium in 2005. It includes over 10 billion particles and simulates 20 million galaxies and quasars. The simulation provides new data on the universe’s evolution and predicts its supercluster structure. One of its first results was that black holes formed earlier than previously thought, challenging current cosmological models.
The Millennium Simulation, formally known as the Millennium Run, is one of the largest simulations of the development of the universe ever made. The millennium simulation was developed in 2005 by the Virgo Consortium, a group of astrophysicists from Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and the United States. The simulation, which was run on a supercomputer in Garching, Germany, included more than 10 billion “particles,” simulating 20 million galaxies and quasars in a virtual cube about 2 billion light-years on a side. The Millennium Simulation was created as a tool for making predictions about the large-scale structure of the universe and comparing them with observational data and the theories of astrophysicists.
The millennium simulation begins about 379,000 years after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, when the universe was extremely dense and hot. And that time, matter consisted of a plasma of electrons, photons and baryons, and the universe was bathed in a stream of radiation. As the universe expanded and cooled, it reached a critical temperature – about 3000 K – and began to “decouple” into radiation and independent matter. This event produced the cosmic microwave background, which today saturates the universe and has a universal temperature of about 2.7 K. Because of detailed observations of the cosmic microwave background, physicists have a good idea of the state of the universe at the time of decoupling, and this information was programmed into the millennium simulation to serve as an initial state.
After running the millennium simulation on a powerful supercomputer for over a month, the Virgo Consortium came up with the results: over 25 terabytes (TB) of data, enough to hold 5,300 DVDs. Displayed in visual form, the output appears as a thin three-dimensional network of strands with fractal self-similarity on multiple levels of organization. These filaments are actually dark matter, which makes up most of the mass in the universe. Dark matter cannot be seen directly, but its existence can be inferred from its gravitational influence on visible matter. In the model, the filaments can be seen directly, which is not possible with real dark matter.
Running the millennium simulation has provided astrophysicists with a wealth of new data on how the universe may have evolved and predicts the ‘supercluster’ structure we observe from astronomical data. One of the first results derived from the millennium simulation was that black holes formed earlier than previously thought, which is supported by experimental data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, but which challenges our current cosmological models.
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