Researchers at MIT, Harvard University, and other institutions have developed an advanced computer simulation named Lumina that models the evolution of the early universe during one of its most transformative periods. The simulation recreates cosmic processes across a region approximately 1.6 billion light-years wide, tracking 2 billion years of history from roughly 45 million years after the Big Bang. The study has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and provides detailed insights into how galaxies formed and radiation spread through space during the universe’s transition from opacity to transparency.
Lumina’s primary achievement involves recreating two major transformations in the early cosmos: hydrogen re-ionization and helium re-ionization. The simulation shows how ultraviolet radiation from the first stars and galaxies gradually ionized neutral hydrogen atoms, making the universe increasingly transparent to ultraviolet light. Helium re-ionization, which requires more energetic radiation, appears to have been driven by actively feeding supermassive black holes rather than stars alone. This represents the first simulation to capture both ionization processes simultaneously, offering a more comprehensive understanding of how these changes reshaped cosmic conditions.
The simulation contains approximately half a trillion individual elements, including dark matter particles and gas cells, providing roughly 30 times the resolution of the earlier IllustrisTNG simulation while covering 100 times more volume than previous leading models. The researchers used Frontier, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, to perform the calculations. According to MIT co-author Xuejian Shen, the peak computation required the equivalent of over 100,000 CPU cores and around 15,000 GPUs working together. The research team has made Lumina available to the scientific community, allowing predictions about early cosmic structures to be compared with observations from existing and future telescopes to advance understanding of the universe’s earliest epochs.
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