To read the real sky, physicists built the largest simulated universe ever on Aurora

To understand the real universe that telescopes are now mapping in extraordinary detail, cosmologists first need a near-perfect artificial one. A team led by Harvard’s Daniel Eisenstein has built exactly that on Argonne’s Aurora exascale supercomputer: a simulation of 35 trillion particles, which they call the largest cosmological N-body simulation ever run. It is less a discovery than a measuring stick — a reference cosmos precise enough to turn billions of mapped galaxies into real answers about dark matter and dark energy.

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