The Hot Universe
The Universe is a vast expanse largely made up of substances that we yet know little about. At The University of Nottingham, scientists are exploring giant structures within the Universe which act as enormous buckets collecting gaseous material. When gas falls into these buckets, it heats up and the hot gas can be detected as it emits X-rays. This is the infamous ‘dark matter’ – we know that the bucket is there but it cannot be seen.
The more dark matter is present the hotter the gas becomes. But, gas can also become hot thanks to the energy released when large structures crash together. Nottingham scientists are using high performance computers to investigate the unanswered question: Is the hot gas we see mainly due to crashes in the Universe or is this a direct measure of the distribution of the elusive ‘dark matter’?
The project involves the largest hydrodynamics simulation ever attempted – a two billion particle model of the Universe, including gas physics. This complements the School of Physics and Astronomy’s involvement in the Millennium project which, at 10 billion particles, was the largest N-body simulation completed to date. The new simulation improves on the Millennium model as it includes gas – vital if you are to understand how hot the gas gets.
The advanced computing power available at Nottingham can assist scientists in observing galaxies that are around 10 billion years old, and to even peer back to those that formed shortly after the big bang 13 billion years ago. The simulations provide models of how the Universe might have developed and with the advancement of high performance computing technology, Nottingham could well be on the road to unravelling the secrets of its evolution.
Key Research Group
Expertise at Nottingham