Cosmos in a Computer

摘要

Folks, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Theorists who spend their time modeling what the universe looked like long ago say that there may be some big surprises in store. As a new fleet of telescopes starts scanning distant reaches of the heavens, it may reveal huge clusters of galaxies that gravity pulled together when the universe was still in its first blush of youth. Extremely rare, these "monster clusters" would have been twice as massive as the typical cluster found in the universe today, and much hotter, says August E. Evrard, a cosmologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He and an international team of astronomers, known as the Virgo Consortium, have created a comprehensive computer simulation of the entire cosmos and have found that it predicts the enorrnous, distant groups of galaxies.