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Einstein realised that the speed of light was one of the defining measures of the Universe. Remember E=mc2, the beautiful little formula that wrapped up the theory of relativity? Well 'c' is the speed of light. And you can measure it. All you need is a microwave, a ruler and a bar of chocolate (and maybe a calculator).

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The Bolshoi simulation is the most accurate cosmological simulation of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe. The simulation is a cube roughly 1 billion light-years on each side. The luminous part of a large galaxy might be about 100,000 light-years, and the diameter of the observable universe is about 90 billion light-years. The volume of the simulation is large enough to contain millions of galaxies, but still only represents a tiny part of the visible universe. he Bolshoi simulation used data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe that measured tiny spatial variations in the cosmic microwave background radiation, giving a glimpse of the distribution of matter and energy at an earlier epoch of the visible universe.

The algorithm that runs the Bolshoi simulation was derived from one that was developed by Andrey V. Kratsov of the University of Chicago that starts by dividing a cubical simulation into a grid of smaller cubical cells. The splitting continues until the number of particles in a cell falls beneath a certain threshold. Each side of the smallest cell is about 4,000 light-years and in total, the level-0 mesh has about 16.8 million cells.

The Bolshoi cube has 8,589,934,592 identical particles, each of which represents about 200 million solar masses. Since the quantum mass is so large, there’s no point in trying to distinguish between baryonic and dark matter. All of the particles in the simulation are dark matter. The primary structures which are formed as the universe first evolved are the dark-matter halos in which galaxies are embedded, but the galaxies themselves are not explicitly represented.

In the beginning, the 8 billion particles were almost uniformly distributed in the cube. This was the state of the universe post-inflation, when the cosmic background radiation was first emitted. The simulation begins with a universe that is about 23 million years old and slowly progresses to its present state, some 400,000 time steps later. The entire simulation was run on NASA’s supercomputer Pleiades, which is currently ranked 7th in the listings of the top 500 supercomputers worldwide, at the Ames Research Center in California. Bolshoi used 13,824 processor cores and 13 TB of memory.

The data generated by the simulations include snapshots, catalogs of halos, and merger trees, which traced the provenance of halos. At the end of the simulation run, there were about 10 million halos left, ranging from the size of a small galaxy to a large cluster of galaxies.

Further study could indicate the location and presence of satellite galaxies. The Milky Way has only two prominent satellite galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds of the Southern Hemisphere. A study of the Bolshoi data might yield the probability of more of such satellites.

The Daily Galaxy via American Scientist

The "Dark Flow" & the Existence of Other Universes --New Claims of Hard Evidence (Weekend Feature)

Supermassive Black Holes --"Did They Form Inside Galaxies or Create Them?"

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LoL by: olmatuck

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