Various projects that help mankind understand the nature and structure of Universe
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- What it is: Uchuu means "Outer Space" in Japanese. It is a Big Data based project which may be the largest and most realistic simulation of the Universe to date.
- Details: It consists of 2.1 trillion particles that are designed as virtual cube, each side of which is 9.63 billion light-years and allows researchers to virtually travel billions of years at any point in the Universe's nearly 13-bilion-year history and will help study the evolution of the Universe in unprecedented detail.The simulation is downloadable and the scale of these structures ranges from the largest galaxy clusters down to the smallest galaxies.
- What it cannot do: It cannot resolve down to the level of individual stars and planets and so can't really be used to answer questions about the existence of alien life. But it scores over related applications in that it allows users to travel extremely far back and plot evolutionary trajectories that allow theories to be simulated.
- An international team of researchers from Japan, Spain, U.S.A., Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, and Italy created Uchuu using ATERUI II, the world's most powerful supercomputer dedicated to astronomy.
- Even with all this power, it still took a year to produce Uchuu. ATERUI II has 40,200 processors (CPU cores) and all of them were made available exclusively for 48 hours each month. Twenty million supercomputer hours were consumed, and 3 Petabytes of data were generated. Every petabyte is a million gigabytes.
- Helping it run: To aid smooth downloads, the research team uses high-performance computational techniques to compress information on the formation and evolution of dark matter halos, clouds of the mysterious stuffy that is believed to make up 95% of the universe but is invisible, in the Uchuu simulation into a 100-terabyte catalogue that is available to everyone on the cloud in a usable format. Future data releases are expected to include catalogues of virtual galaxies and gravitational lensing maps.
- The furure: Big Data science products from Uchuu will help astronomers learn how to interpret Big Data galaxy surveys expected in coming years from facilities like the Subaru Telescope and the ESA Euclid space mission.
- Knowledge Centre:
- Structure of the Universe - The large-scale structure of the Universe is made up of voids and filaments, that can be broken down into superclusters, clusters, galaxy groups, and subsequently into galaxies. At a relatively smaller scale, we know that galaxies are made up of stars and their constituents, our own Solar System being one of them.
- How they exist - Although there are some galaxies that are found to stray away by their lonesome, most of them are actually bundled into groups and clusters. Groups are smaller, usually made up of less than 50 galaxies and can have diameters up to 6 million light-years. In fact, the group in which our Milky Way is a member of is made up of only a little over 40 galaxies. Generally speaking, clusters are bunches of 50 to 1,000 galaxies that can have diameters of up to 2-10 megaparsecs. One very peculiar property of clusters is that the velocities of their galaxies are supposed to be too high for gravity alone to keep them bunched together … and yet they are. The idea that dark matter exists starts at this scale of structure. Dark matter is believed to provide the gravitational force that keeps them all bunched up. A great number of groups, clusters and individual galaxies can come together to form the next larger structure – superclusters. Superclusters are among the largest structures ever to be discovered in the universe.
- Filaments and Voids - The largest single structure to be identified is the Sloan Great Wall, a vast sheet of galaxies that span a length of 500 million light-years, a width of 200 million light-years and a thickness of only 15 million light-years. Scientists see a universe made up of mainly two components. There are the threadlike structures known as "filaments" made up of isolated galaxies, groups, clusters and superclusters. And there are vast empty bubbles of empty space called "voids".
- EXAM QUESTIONS: (1) Explain the general super structure of the Universe, as known today. (2) What purpose does studying large universal structures, serves? Explain.
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