This TNG50 galaxy will be similar in mass and shape to Andromeda (M31) by the time the movie reaches the current epoch. Insets show large-scale dark matter and then gas (lower left), and small-scale stellar and gaseous distributions (lower right). The main panel shows the density of the cosmic gas (high in white, low in black). The formation of a single massive galaxy through time, from early cosmic epochs until the present day, in the TNG50 cosmic simulation. The calculation itself required 16,000 cores on the Hazel Hen supercomputer in Stuttgart, working together, 24/7, for more than a year-the equivalent of fifteen thousand years on a single processor, making it one of the most demanding astrophysical computations to date. It does so with more than 20 billion particles representing dark (invisible) matter, stars, cosmic gas, magnetic fields, and supermassive black holes. In a simulated cube of space that is more than 230 million light-years across, TNG50 can discern physical phenomena that occur on scales one million times smaller, tracing the simultaneous evolution of thousands of galaxies over 13.8 billion years of cosmic history. For the first time, it combines the idea of a large-scale cosmological simulation-a Universe in a box-with the computational resolution of "zoom" simulations, at a level of detail that had previously only been possible for studies of individual galaxies. The TNG50 simulation, which has just been published, manages to avoid this trade-off. Large-volume simulations, in turn, typically lack the details necessary to reproduce many of the small-scale properties we observe in our own Universe, reducing their predictive power. Detailed simulations with limited volumes can model no more than a few galaxies, making statistical deductions difficult. Astronomers running cosmological simulations face a fundamental trade-off: with finite computing power, typical simulations so far have been either very detailed or have spanned a large volume of virtual space, but have so far not been able to do both.
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