Southern Methodist University | 08 July 2010
Self-consistent solution of cosmological radiation-hydrodynamics and chemical ionizationThe Big Bang that created the universe more than 13 billion years ago was a huge hodgepodge of chemical reactions. Hydrogen, helium and other gases ultimately began clumping together to form stars, planets and galaxies.
How exactly did that happen?
Scientists now have a better chance of finding answers to that mystery because of the massive computational power of supercomputers – today’s fastest, most powerful computers, says Daniel R. Reynolds, assistant professor of mathematics in Dedman College.
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In collaboration with his UC San Diego colleagues, Reynolds has developed a new mathematical model that simulates a slice in time soon after the Big Bang: the so-called “dark ages,” 380,000 years to 400 million years after the universe was born, when gravity pulled gases into the first stars.
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A key characteristic differentiates the team’s model from others: “By forcing the computational methods to tightly bind different physical processes together, our new model allows us to generate simulations that are highly accurate, numerically stable and computationally scalable to the largest supercomputers available,” Reynolds says.
The team presented its research at a Texas Cosmology Network Meeting at the University of Texas. Reynolds’ mathematical research also was published in the Journal of Computational Physics.
- Journal of Computational Physics, Volume 228, Issue 18, 01 Oct 2009, doi: 10.1016/j.jcp.2009.06.006