Lumina Visualizes 2 Billion Years of Cosmic Dawn for Webb Comparison
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Oct 26
Lumina Visualizes 2 Billion Years of Cosmic Dawn for Webb Comparison
3 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Oct 26
Summary
Released Sunday, Lumina’s new visualizations trace the early universe from 50 million to 2 billion years after the Big Bang in unusually fine detail.
The simulation maps dark matter alongside hot hydrogen and helium, showing the shift from a nearly featureless, cold neutral cosmos to one with early galaxies, growing black holes and ionized gas.
James Webb Space Telescope observations give astronomers a way to test those predictions against real data from the era when the first stars and galaxies formed.
Built by researchers including Oliver Zier at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Lumina extends efforts to explain how galaxy formation physics operated across cosmic time.
Will Lumina's unprecedented virtual universe match the surprising early-galaxy chemical discoveries recently captured by the James Webb Space Telescope?
Can an exascale supercomputer recreating half a trillion cosmic elements finally reveal how the first supermassive black holes ended the dark ages?