Lars Hernquist News Today

Cambridge, MA -- It looks like fireflies flickering in the darkness. Slowly, more and more amass, lighting up the screen in large chunks and clusters. But this is not a video about insects. It's a simulation of the early universe, a time after the Big Bang when the cosmos transformed from a place of utter darkness to a radiant, light-filled environment.

New high-resolution simulations show one million galaxies forming some 13 billion years ago.

Using one of the world’s largest supercomputers, high-resolution simulations were created that show 1 million galaxies forming some 13 billion years ago.

Center for Astrophysics A Hubble image of the colliding galaxies NGC3690. Over its lifetime, a galaxy’s star formation history is affected by many physical processes including mergers. A new study uses many simulations of galaxy evolution to develop a statistical method to categorize the star-formation history from snapshot observations. NASA/ESA/Hubble Galaxies in the observable universe show a remarkable diversity in their structure and properties, mostly because of the many different pat...