While scientists and astronomers are continually discovering new facts about the formation of the galaxy, one thing that’s always been a little more difficult to explain is how stars came about. By understanding where stars came from, we’ll get a better understanding of our own origins.





The problem is that our galaxy is huge and so carrying out any experiments to determine our origins are expensive and time-consuming. Some aspects of astrophysics are literally impossible to study close up and so the only way to gain any real insight is via supercomputers.

This recent simulation was the result of a joint collaboration involving researchers from the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, the Max Planck Institutes for Astrophysics and for Astronomy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York.

In order to develop the simulation, the researchers used the supercomputing resources that are housed at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS). The new simulation will enable researchers to better understand the early stages of the formation of the universe.

The new development draws upon a previous simulation created in 2015 named Illustris that was the largest ever hydrological simulation of a galaxy formation. Simulations of this nature allow researchers to get a much more accurate simulation of the gas movement. Because of the close relationship this simulation has with the original Illustris, it was aptly named Illustris, The Next Generation, or IllustrisTNG for short.

To create a reasonably accurate computer simulation the researchers had to first feed in equations and other data from a variety of sources including satellite arrays. While the researchers can to a point create a simulation without using any external data, it won’t be anywhere near as accurate.





As the knowledge and expertise of our scientists expand, so too does the ability to simulate largest areas of space at a much more intricate level. One of the team’s biggest advances was the fact that they can now account for magnetic fields in the simulation, increasing its accuracy even more.

“Magnetic fields are interesting for a variety of reasons,” said Prof. Dr. Volker Springel, lead investigator on the study and professor and researcher at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies. “The magnetic pressure exerted on cosmic gas can occasionally be equal to thermal (temperature) pressure, meaning that if you neglect this, you will miss these effects and ultimately compromise your results.”

The original Illustris data release attracted around 2,000 users to register, resulting in more than 130 publications. Because IllustrisTNG’s dataset is more accurate and larger the researchers are confident it will be just as popular, if not more, than that of the original model.

“Increased memory and processing resources in next-generation systems will allow us to simulate large volumes of the universe with higher resolution,” says team member Dr. Dylan Nelson. “Large volumes are important for cosmology, understanding the large-scale structure of the universe, and making firm predictions for the next generation of large observational projects. High resolution is important for improving our physical models of the processes going on inside of individual galaxies in our simulation.”





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