New simulation maps the first seconds after the big bangfocusing on what scientists call the galactic medium, or intergalactic gas and dust.
A team led by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) used machine learning, a type of algorithm in which a computer is trained to recognize patterns, to complete 100,000 hours of calculation. The algorithm for this project is called Hydro-BAM.
This new work allowed the researchers to map phenomena including dark matterActivated gas, neutral hydrogen and other cosmic ingredients needed to understand the structure of our universe, IAC representatives said on May 20. declaration (Opens in a new tab).
Related: History of the Universe: Big Bang so far in 10 easy steps
They added: “The research also made it possible to reproduce so-called ‘Lyman alpha’ forests in high resolution. This is a specific pattern of lines in the spectrum (light signature) of galaxies and similar objects created when clouds of hydrogen gas absorb galactic light.
“These ‘virtual universes’ serve as a test bed for the study cosmologyThe researchers added: “However, computational simulations are expensive and current computing facilities only allow this. [us] Explore the small cosmic scales. «
Hydro-BAM is designed to include probability, machine learning, and cosmology, which means the history of the universe. “This algorithm made it possible to get very accurate predictions in just a few tens of seconds,” the researchers said.
Drawing absorption lines in the galaxy’s spectra allowed the team to get an idea of where the clouds of hydrogen gas are located. Location is a proxy for distance, since The universe is constantly expanding.. The clouds also provide clues about what is in the intergalactic medium of gas and dust.
“The breakthrough came when we realized that the connections between the amounts of intergalactic gas, dark matter and neutral hydrogen that we were trying to model are well organized in a hierarchical way,” said Francesco Cengiglia, a doctoral student at the University of La Laguna in Spain, IAC, University of Padua in Italy and lead author of the research.
The most recent study on the research was published in March in astrophysical journalA related study was published in the same magazine In November 2021.
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