A study that is more than ten years old, made at the Magellan Baade Telescope, at the Las Campanas Observatory, in Carnegie, Chile, has shown the possibility of a new approach to answering this fundamental mystery of the universe, which basically has to do with its structure.
The results, led by Daniel Kerson of Carnegie, have been published in the Monthly News of the Royal Academy of Astronomy.
Describing the indescribable
Did kelson wonder: How to describe the indescribable? The answer he found was: “Taking a new approach to the whole problem.”
“Our tactic gives us an intuitive insight into how gravity has managed the growth of structure since the earliest days of the universe,” says one of the co-authors, Andrew Benson.
“This is a direct observation based on one of the tests that are pillars of cosmology.”
The first galaxies are known to have formed a couple of million years after the Big Bang, the Big Bang. That started when the universe was hot and it was an extremely energetic particle soup.
As the material expanded after the Big Bang, it began to cool and many of the particles simply turned into hydrogen. There were patches denser than others, and eventually, their gravity influenced the final trajectory of the expanding universe, forming the first structures in the cosmos.
A study that is more than ten years old, made at the Magellan Baade Telescope, at the Las Campanas Observatory, in Carnegie, Chile, has shown the possibility of a new approach to answering this fundamental mystery of the universe, which basically has to do with its structure.
The results, led by Daniel Kerson of Carnegie, have been published in the Monthly News of the Royal Academy of Astronomy.
Describing the indescribable
Did kelson wonder: How to describe the indescribable? The answer he found was: “Taking a new approach to the whole problem.”
“Our tactic gives us an intuitive insight into how gravity has managed the growth of structure since the earliest days of the universe,” says one of the co-authors, Andrew Benson.
“This is a direct observation based on one of the tests that are pillars of cosmology.”
The first galaxies are known to have formed a couple of million years after the Big Bang, the Big Bang. That started when the universe was hot and it was an extremely energetic particle soup.
As the material expanded after the Big Bang, it began to cool and many of the particles simply turned into hydrogen. There were patches denser than others, and eventually, their gravity influenced the final trajectory of the expanding universe, forming the first structures in the cosmos.
The issue is therefore to understand the difference in densities that allowed the creation of large and small structures, which were formed in some places and not in others, which has been a fascinating topic of discussion in science for years.
But so far, astronomers’ abilities to model how this structure, which is already around 13 billion years old, has its mathematical limitations.
And it is that, according to Benson, “the gravitational interactions that took place between the particles in the universe are so complex to explain that simple mathematics does not serve us.”
The solution is to make mathematical approximations
As a result, astronomers began to use mathematical approaches, which compromise the precision of their models.
This can be simulated on the computer using numerical models for all interactions between galaxies, but not for all interactions that occur between particles, because this is too complicated.
“A key point of our work was to count the mass present in the stars that we found in a huge selection of distant galaxies and use this information to formulate a new approach, to understand how the structure of the universe was formed,” Kelson explained.
The team is very large: Louis Abramson, Shannon Patel, Stephen Shectman, Alan Dressler, Patrick McCarthy, and John S. Mulchaey, as well as Rik Williams (who is now at Uber Technologies).
They have proved for the first time that the growth of proto-structures can be calculated and averaged across space. And this has revealed why the denser blocks grew faster and the less dense, slower.
Working in reverse
An interesting point in the work was working in reverse and determining the original distributions and growth rates of fluctuations in density, which would eventually give the large-scale structures that determine the distribution of galaxies as we see them now.
So if we were to summarize this work, it essentially gives a precise description of why and how the fluctuation of densities grows in the way that is observed in the real universe, as well as the computational work that allows us to speculate and understand the universe in his childhood.
“And this is all so simple, it’s so elegant,” adds Kelson.