Dark Matter Movie from the Bolshoi Simulation
Video Credit:
A. Klypin
(NMSU),
J. Primack
(UCSC) et al.,
Chris Henze
(NASA Ames),
NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer
What if you could fly through the universe and see dark matter?
While the technology for taking such a flight remains under development, the technology for visualizing such a flight has taken a grand leap forward with the completion of the
Bolshoi Cosmological Simulation.
After 6 million CPU hours, the world's
seventh fastest supercomputer output many scientific novelties including the
above flight simulation.
Starting from the relatively smooth dark matter distribution of the early universe discerned from the
microwave background and other large sky data sets, the Bolshoi tracked the universe's evolution to the present epoch shown above, given the
standard concordance cosmology.
The bright spots in the above video are all knots of normally invisible dark matter, many of which contain
normal galaxies.
Long filaments and
clusters of galaxies, all gravitationally dominated by dark matter, become evident.
Statistical comparison between the Bolshoi and current real sky maps of actual galaxies show
good agreement.
Although the Bolshoi simulation bolsters the existence of dark matter, many questions about our universe remain, including the composition of dark matter, the nature of
dark energy, and how the
first generation of stars and galaxies formed.