A multinational team of physicists had been working on a project to simulate the universe for several years, and finally it came to an end. Meet IllustrisTNG, arguably the most complex model of the universe to date.
Such projects are by no means a beautiful installation or an educational project, but quite a working tool. IllustrisTNG allows researchers to reconstruct the formation and evolution of galaxies over time, or simulate huge structures like magnetic fields, or see how dark matter and heavy elements are distributed throughout the universe.
It should be noted that such simulations are not perfect models of the real Universe, each of them contains its own shortcomings. IllustrisTNG, for example, has a cubic shape, and it is much smaller than our Universe, here each face is only a billion light years away.
Nevertheless, such projects are still important, they help scientists understand how the universe works, test theories and hypotheses, and also understand how to find in reality the effects that researchers have seen only in simulations. In three articles published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, physicists have described how black holes affect star formation and how galaxies form and merge. In reality, it is difficult to notice traces of collisions between galaxies, but the simulation may prompt astronomers to search in the right direction.
Nikolay Kudryavtsev
