Cosmological simulations are crucial to studying how the universe came to be, but many do not typically match what astronomers observe through telescopes. Instead, they are often designed to mirror the real universe in a statistical sense.
Constrained cosmological simulations, on the other hand, are designed to directly reproduce the structures we actually observe in the universe. However, most existing simulations of this kind have only been applied to our local universe, until now.
A team of researchers from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe have developed a simulation that allows them to study the life cycle of ancestor galaxy cities, known as 'COSTCO' (COnstrained Simulations of The COsmos Field). The tool's findings have been published in Nature Astronomy.
Since light from the distant universe is only reaching Earth now, the galaxies which telescopes observe today are a snapshot of the past, leading the...