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Section site map: News |
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News | |
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NewsMaking the holes countBy including black holes for the first time in a large-scale cosmological simulation, physicists uncover their function in regulating the structure of galaxies Download a pdf of the print version.
Snapshots from the simulation show evolution of structure in a large volume of the universe. Gas density is shown (increasing with brightness) with temperature (increasing from blue to red color). Yellow circles indicate black holes (diameter increasing with mass). At about 450 million years after the big bang (POINTER to first graphic), as the early universe still shows a relatively uniform structure, the first black hole appears. At about 6 billion years (POINTER to 2nd graphic, many yellow circles), the universe has many black holes and a pronounced filamentary structure. Once thought to be rare, exotic bodies, black holes are now known to be ubiquitous, often hugely massive features of galaxies. Until recent work by a team of physicists led by Tiziana Di Matteo of Carnegie Mellon University, however, computational power had been insufficient to include black holes within large-scale simulations of the universe. TeraGrid resources have changed this. With the availability of PSC's Cray XT3 as a production resource, Di Matteo and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics simulated a sizable fraction of the universe for the first time with black holes included. "The XT3 was ideal for this simulation because it has incredibly fast built-in communication," says Di Matteo, who used 2,000 XT3 processors for over four weeks of computing time. With black holes and the quasars they spawn included, their simulation evolved the cosmos over the 14 billion years since the Big Bang. Their findings, forthcoming in the Astrophysical Journal, show that black holes play a fundamental role in organizing this evolution. Their simulation indicates that far from being only destroyers, gobbling up all matter within reach, black holes regulate galaxy formation. With data from the simulation, the researchers tracked the evolution of fundamental relationships between black holes and the galaxy where they reside, and they have developed new insight into the formation of the first quasars in the universe. "Ours is the first cosmological simulation to incorporate black-hole physics," says Di Matteo, a theoretical cosmologist. "It involves more calculations than any prior similar modeling of the cosmos. The galaxies we see today look the way they do because of black holes. This result offers the best picture to date of how the cosmos formed and evolved."
Tiziana Di Matteo, Carnegie Mellon University. More informationhttp://www.phys.cmu.edu/people/faculty/DiMatteo/ |
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