MIT's incredible simulation shows light spreading across universe after big bang; WATCH

The universe was engulfed in darkness until a sudden explosion scattered light across the cosmos eventually leading to the birth of stars, planets and even galaxies. While this theory was limited on paper, a team of experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University has created a simulation depicting the spread of light after the big bang. Packed into a minute-long video clip, the simulation shows fireflies-Esque particles of light illuminating the cosmos around 14 billion years ago.

The calculations for the simulation crossed 30 million CPU hours: MIT

The simulation, which has been developed under Project Thesan, depicts the event called the 'epoch of reionisation' that marks the end of darkness as light from the explosion transmitted to the universe's far-fetched corners. According to MIT, the Thesan simulation was created using the SuperMUC-NG machine, which is one of the largest supercomputers in the world. The supercomputer carried out calculations equivalent to over 30 million CPU hours to create the simulation, something which would have taken 3,500 years to run on a single desktop, as per MIT. 

Calling it a 'cosmic bridge', the experts noted that the simulation initially depicted conditions for around 4,00,000 years after the Big Bang. These conditions were then evolved forward in time to simulate a patch of the universe. Explaining what the simulation is about, Rahul Kannan, paper author and an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard said, "Thesan follows how the light from the first galaxies interacts with the gas over the first billion years and transforms the universe from neutral to ionized. This way, we automatically follow the reionisation process as it unfolds".

Interestingly, Kannan revealed that light did not travel large distances early in the universe, as per Thesan. "In fact, this distance is very small, and only becomes large at the very end of reionization, increasing by a factor of 10 over just a few hundred million years", he added. Another expert Aaron Smith, a NASA Einstein Fellow in MIT’s Kavli Institute said that Thesan, "is intended to serve as an ideal simulation counterpart for upcoming observational facilities, which are poised to fundamentally alter our understanding of the cosmos". 

Image: NASA