Cosmology: forming universe structures (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, April 27, 2020, 23:02 (1670 days ago) @ John Kalber

A new complex computer study on galaxy formation and placement:

https://phys.org/news/2020-04-elegant-solution-reveals-universe.html

"A 10-year survey of tens of thousands of galaxies made using the Magellan Baade Telescope at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile provided a new approach to answering this fundamental mystery.

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"The first galaxies were formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which started the universe as a hot, murky soup of extremely energetic particles. As this material expanded outward from the initial explosion, it cooled, and the particles coalesced into neutral hydrogen gas. Some patches were denser than others and, eventually, their gravity overcame the universe's outward trajectory and the material collapsed inward, forming the first clumps of structure in the cosmos.

"The density differences that allowed for structures both large and small to form in some places and not in others have been a longstanding topic of fascination. But until now, astronomers' abilities to model how structure grew in the universe over the last 13 billion years faced mathematical limitations.

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"'A key goal of our survey was to count up the mass present in stars found in an enormous selection of distant galaxies and then use this information to formulate a new approach to understanding how structure formed in the universe," Kelson explained.

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"Doing this revealed that denser clumps grew faster, and less-dense clumps grew more slowly.
They were then able to work backward and determine the original distributions and growth rates of the fluctuations in density, which would eventually become the large-scale structures that determined the distributions of galaxies we see today.

"In essence, their work provided a simple, yet accurate, description of why and how density fluctuations grow the way they do in the real universe, as well as in the computational-based work that underpins our understanding of the universe's infancy."

Comment: There is no change in theory but a much better understanding of the universe's evolution.