The BHCosmo Project

The BHCosmo project runs a simulation of a quarter of a billion particles to trace the evolution of the dark and visible matter distribution in a cubic region of the universe over 100 million light years. The simulation was run on 2000 CPUs at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). A snapshot from the computer simulation shows evolution of structure in a large volume of the universe. Increasing gas density is tied to increasing brightness and temperature is indicated as increasing from blue to red in color. Yellow circles indicate black holes (greater diameter equating to greater mass). At about 6 billion years after the big bang, the universe has many black holes and a pronounced filamentary structure. More information can be found at the researcher’s BHCosmo study website .

Credit: Tiziana Di Matteo, McWilliams Center for Cosmology, Carnegie Mellon University