Scientists were able to "fast-forward" simulations of ancient galaxy clusters to our present day in a first-of-its-kind study.
ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. See More → When light from the early universe reaches Earth, it presents an eerie snapshot of ancient stars and galaxies that have long since died, or taken on different forms over the course of billions of years. Though we cannot directly see the future of these objects, scientists have now figured out how to do the next best thing by "fast-forwarding" simulations of the cosmic web, a network of large-scale structures that connects the universe, over the course of 11 billion years to its present state, reports a new study. Advertisement In this way, researchers led by Metin Ata, a cosmologist at the University of Tokyo's Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, were able to unspool the long-term evolution of giant galaxy clusters like a "time machine," in the words of one author. The new technique allowed the team "to 'fast-forward' the simulation to our present day and study the evolution of observed cosmic structures self-consistently," revealing that at least one of these ancient "protoclusters" likely collapsed into an enormous cosmic web filament spanning 300 million light years, according to a study published in Nature Astronomy on Thursday. The results also provide a means to test the standard model of cosmology, alternately known as the Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM), which is a well-corroborated framework to explain the weird properties of the universe, including the existence of dark matter, an unexplained substance that is far more abundant than regular "baryonic" matter. "Understanding the formation of large-scale structures in the Universe, starting from tiny fluctuations in the matter density and subsequently evolving gravitationally into the complex cosmic web seen at the present epoch, is a key ambition of cosmological science," Ata and his colleagues said in the study. Advertisement "As gravitationally…