Scientists from MIT, Harvard University, and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics are collaborating on the Thesan Project, named after the Etruscan goddess of the dawn, which attempts to simulate the “cosmic dawn”. More specifically, the cosmic reionization, a period which that has challenged researchers to reconstruct, because it involves vastly complicated, chaotic interactions, including those between gravity, gas, and radiation.
Using the Thesan simulator, researchers are capable of simulating a cubic volume of the universe spanning 300 million light years across. To track the first appearance and evolution of hundreds of thousands of galaxies within this space, they need to run the simulation forward in time, starting around 400,000 years after the Big Bang, and then through the first billion years. The results will help them determine how far light can travel in the early universe, and which galaxies were responsible for reionization.
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Thesan acts as a bridge to the early universe. It is intended to serve as an ideal simulation counterpart for upcoming observational facilities, which are poised to fundamentally alter our understanding of the cosmos,” said Aaron Smith, a NASA Einstein Fellow in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
