HPCwire: Carnegie Mellon Team Simulates Cosmic Evolution

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July 06, 2007

Carnegie Mellon Team Simulates Cosmic Evolution

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First-of-Its-Kind Model Incorporates Black Holes, Helps Predict Where To Aim Future Telescopes

PITTSBURGH, July 2 -- By incorporating the physics of black holes into a highly sophisticated model running on a powerful supercomputing system, an international team of scientists has produced an unprecedented simulation of cosmic evolution that verifies and deepens our understanding of relationships between black holes and the galaxies in which they reside. Called BHCosmo, the simulation shows that black holes are integral to the structure of the cosmos and may help guide users of future telescopes, showing them what to look for as they aim to locate the earliest cosmic events and untangle the history of the universe.

The research team is led by Carnegie Mellon University and includes scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. The research is in press with The Astrophysical Journal (http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0705.2269).

"Ours is the first simulation to incorporate black hole physics," said Tiziana Di Matteo, a theoretical cosmologist and associate professor of physics at the Mellon College of Science at Carnegie Mellon. "It is very computationally challenging, involving more calculations than any prior similar modeling of the cosmos, and the result offers us the best picture to date of how the cosmos formed."

Di Matteo performed her simulation using the Cray XT3 system at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), the most powerful "tightly coupled" system available via the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid. Di Matteo's collaborators included Jörg Colberg at Carnegie Mellon, Volker Springel and Debora Sijacki at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and Lars Hernquist at Harvard.

Experimental observations reveal that black holes are important regulators of galaxy formation and, ultimately, the fabric of today's universe, according to Di Matteo. Nevertheless, previous simulations didn't take black holes into account because the computing demand was prohibitive.

"Including black holes in computer simulations is critical. The galaxies we see today look the way they do because of black hole physics," added Springel, junior research group leader at Max Planck. "We must do simulations to understand the role black holes have played in forming structures of both the early universe and today."

The largest black holes, called supermassive black holes, lie at the center of each galaxy. They can arise initially when the first stars collapse under their own gravity. Surrounded by dense gas in their central locations, they consume surrounding material, both gas and stars, and rapidly grow to become monstrous in size, some with masses a billion times that of our sun. But evidence suggests that supermassive black holes are self-regulators -- they don't feast forever and they never swallow a whole galaxy, Di Matteo said.

In her cosmic simulation, as in reality, galaxies routinely collide. The supermassive black holes embedded at the center of these galaxies choreograph the dynamics of galaxy collision. The result is a tremendous belch of energy produced as the merging black holes form a luminous state called a quasar.

"Quasar formation really captures when the fun happens in a galaxy," Di Matteo said. "You can only use a simulation to follow a complex, nonlinear history like this to understand how quasars and other cosmic structures come about."

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