DiRAC’s Memory Intensive Service at Durham helps scientists produce the largest and most accurate virtual representation of the universe to date.

The SIBELIUS Project ran their constrained realisation simulation, “SIBELIUS-DARK”, over several weeks and produced over one Petabyte of data. This simulation recreates the formation of our current Universe out to 200 Mpc, starting from the Big Bang. It is a Dark-Matter-only simulation using a semi-analytic galaxy formation model, ‘Galform’. Individual massive galaxy clusters we see in the sky around us can be inferred from the simulation! The study has found that our Local Universe has slightly lower density relative to the average over cosmic scales.

Stuart McAlpine, John C Helly, Matthieu Schaller, Till Sawala, Guilhem Lavaux, Jens Jasche, Carlos S Frenk, Adrian Jenkins, John R Lucey, Peter H Johansson, SIBELIUS-DARK: a galaxy catalogue of the Local Volume from a constrained realisation simulation, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2022;, stac295, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac295

The full findings were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

https://www.ukri.org/news/uk-supercomputers-produce-virtual-representation-of-the-universe/