Millennium Simulation Visualizations

The cold dark matter model has become the leading theoretical paradigm for the formation of structure in the Universe. Together with the theory of cosmic inflation, this model makes a clear prediction for the initial conditions for structure formation and predicts that structures grow hierarchically through gravitational instability. Testing this model requires that the precise measurements delivered by galaxy surveys can be compared to robust and equally precise theoretical calculations. In the Millennium Simulation project, the Virgo Consortium has presented a novel framework for the quantitative physical interpretation of such surveys. This combines the largest simulation of the growth of dark matter structure carried out up to that time with new techniques for following the formation and evolution of the visible components. In particular, we have shown that baryon-induced features in the initial conditions of the Universe are reflected in distorted form in the low-redshift galaxy distribution, an effect that can be used to constrain the nature of dark energy with next generation surveys.

The Millennium Simulation has also been used to create a number of visualizations of the predicted dark matter structure and the galaxy distribution on large scales, some of them are reproduced on this page. Credit for the visualizations below should be given to V. Springel and the publication:

• Simulations of the formation, evolution and clustering of galaxies and quasars
  Springel V., White S. D. M., Jenkins A., Frenk C. S., Yoshida N., Gao L., Navarro J., Thacker R., Croton D., Helly J., Peacock J. A., Cole S., et al. (2005)
  Nature, 435, 629 [ADS]

MPEG4, 166 MB, 1920×1080 pixel

divx5, 118 MB, 1024×768 pixel, no annotation