HUN-REN Researchers Contribute to the World’s Largest Virtual Universe

The international Euclid Consortium has created the most detailed and expansive virtual model of the universe to date: the Flagship simulation, containing an astonishing 3.4 billion galaxies. Hungarian researchers from the HUN-REN Center for Astronomy and Earth Sciences (HUN-REN CSFK) also took part in the project, contributing to a tool that plays a key role in mapping the structure of the cosmos and studying the elusive dark matter and dark energy.

The simulation supports the work of the Euclid space telescope, launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in June 2023. Over the next six years, Euclid will survey one-third of the sky to create the largest and most detailed cosmic map ever produced.

To interpret Euclid’s future data, scientists needed a realistic and complex synthetic model of the universe — and that is exactly what the Flagship simulation provides.

It includes virtual galaxies located up to 10 billion light-years away and allows researchers to explore the cosmic web, test cosmological models, and better understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

The Flagship simulation is a monumental international effort led by the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) and the Port d’Informació Científica (PIC). The project uses advanced computational models developed by the University of Zurich, simulating the gravitational interactions of 4 trillion particles. From this simulation, scientists identified 16 billion gravitationally bound structures (haloes), that were then populated with realistic galaxies modeled on current astronomical observations.

The final catalog contains 3.4 billion galaxies and over 400 galaxy properties, including brightness, shape, velocity, and position

This detailed dataset models the large-scale structure of the universe, including galaxy clusters, filaments, and enormous nearly empty regions known as cosmic voids.

“We examine Flagship’s simulated universe using the same statistical methods as we would use for the real universe, modeling the imperfections in the data as well.

This allows us to test how accurately we will be able to map the cosmic web, that is key to getting the most out of Euclid’s real data,”

said András Kovács, leader of the HUN-REN CSFK MTA Momentum (Lendület) group, who participated in the research.

Creating such a database was both a scientific and technical challenge. New computational and statistical methods had to be developed and the latest knowledge about the formation and evolution of galaxies had to be incorporated, linking all this to the dark components of the universe.

Via hun-ren.hu, Featured image: Pexels

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