A new simulation developed by a team of international researchers may bring us closer to finally understanding how our universe evolved.
The simulation starts 12 million years after the Big Bang and traces “13 billion years of cosmic evolution.” It shows that the first galaxies formed around clumps of dark matter – a mysterious, “invisible matter” that scientists use to account for gravitational force where no mass is apparent. While we know the universe started with the Big Bang approximately 13.8 billion years ago, scientists are curious to figure out how our modern cosmic features came to be.
One group of researchers, led by Mark Vogelsberger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have created what is considered to be the most accurate, complete and clearest simulation of the universe ever created. The process involves entering details of what the Universe was like shortly after the Big Bang, developing a computer program which encapsulates the main theories of cosmology and then letting the program run. Prior simulations often came out as very approximate versions of what the scientists actually saw.
“Previous simulations of the growth of cosmic structures have broadly reproduced the ‘cosmic web’ of galaxies that we see in the Universe, but failed to create a mixed population of elliptical and spiral galaxies, because of numerical inaccuracies and incomplete physical models,” the scientists explain in the research of the project, which they published in the journal Nature this past May. Most importantly, unlike what has previously been believed, the universe at its largest scale has structure and its galaxies and “dark matter” seem to be organized by a Cosmic Tree.
This will be particularly useful for testing emerging theories about the origin of the universe and how it has evolved. Physical Biologist Carl Calleman, for instance, points out that the simulation confirms his theory presented in the 2009 book The Purposeful Universe, according to which the evolution of the universe at its largest scale is organized in relation to a “Cosmic Tree.” His prediction of a Cosmic Tree has thus now been verified.
“[My theory] was based on the ancient idea that on several different levels - galactic, planetary, organismic, etc. - there are Trees of Life that play a crucial role in organizing biological species and their evolution,” Calleman explains. “A well-known such a “tree” is the Earth’s polar axis. What so far has been missing in this theory is a clear physical tree, including all of the galaxies, which encompasses the entire universe. The recent discovery in the computer simulation verifies what I have predicted and unifies modern science with the view of the ancients, who all over the world believed that there was a Tree of Life at the center of the universe."
"The structure of this Cosmic Tree trickles down through the different lower systems, from galaxies and solar systems down to the earth and its biological species, says Calleman. In this view the reason that we and other biological species have anatomical structures is then that the universe at its largest scale has structure. The idea of a randomly generated universe goes out the window.”
The discovery that the universe has had a tree-like structure from the very beginning may be considered as one of the greatest discoveries of all time. Its implications have however not yet been given enough attention. In contrast to the long held belief that the universe was isotropic and homogenous at its largest scale, scientists and the public alike must now ponder the questions: “What is the origin of this structure?” and “How did the ancient peoples of our planet know that the universe was organized like a Tree?”
