New simulation charts how the universe developed within seconds of the Big Bang
A new simulation maps the first few seconds after the Big Bang, focusing on what scientists call the intergalactic medium, or the gas and dust between galaxies. A team led by researchers at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) used machine learning, a type of algorithm in which a computer is trained to recognise patterns, to complete 100,000 hours of computation.
This work allowed researchers to chart phenomena including dark matter, energised gas, neutral hydrogen and other cosmic ingredients that are essential to understanding the structure of our universe. The research has also made it possible to reproduce with high precision the so-called Lyman-alpha forest – a particular pattern of lines in a spectrum of galaxies and similar objects created when clouds of hydrogen gas in the way absorb the galactic light.
Charting the absorption lines in the galactic spectra allowed the team to learn about where the clouds of hydrogen gas are located. Location is a proxy for distance, given that the universe is continually expanding. The clouds also give clues as to what is contained in the intergalactic medium of gas and dust. “The breakthrough came when we understood that the connections between the quantities of intergalactic gas, dark matter and neutral hydrogen that we were trying to model are well organised in a hierarchical way,” Francesco Sinigaglia, a doctoral student at the University of La Laguna in Spain, the IAC and the University of Padua in Italy, said.