The universe is a big place. I mean it's a really big place.
Shrinking even a small portion of that expanse down to some sort of human-scale overview is, well, a bit of an undertaking.
Just ask these folks:
Researchers have created what they describe as the "largest and most accurate computer simulation to date" of our section of the universe.
Scientists created the simulations, from the Big Bang to the present, using a supercomputer to recreate the entire evolution of the cosmos.
By using advanced statistical techniques, the simulations are conditioned to reproduce our specific patch of universe, therefore containing the present day structures in the vicinity of our own galaxy that astronomers have observed for decades.
So it's a roadmap. You definitely need one of those, especially if you're out for your family universe vacation and your dad is too proud to stop for directions.
Let's not understate the immense scope of this whole thing:
It covers a volume up to a distance of 600 million light years from Earth and is represented by more than 130 billion simulated particles, requiring many thousands of computers working in tandem over several weeks and producing more than one petabyte of data.
One petabyte.
That is, to put it mildly, a lot:
An extremely large unit of digital data, one Petabyte is equal to 1,000 Terabytes. Some estimates hold that a Petabyte is the equivalent of 20 million tall filing cabinets or 500 billion pages of standard printed text.
That's kinda mind-blowing, although honestly it feels like they probably could've just found a filing cabinet big enough rather than go to all the trouble using "many thousands of computers."
Okay maybe they'd need a few filing cabinets. Either way, great stuff.
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