Millennium Simulation: “The Largest Model of Our Universe”

The most current estimates guess that there are 125 to 200 billion galaxies in the Universe, each of which has hundreds of billions of stars. A recent German supercomputer simulation put that number even higher: 500 billion. In other words, there could be a galaxy out there for every star in the Milky Way.. The Millennium Run simulation starts with the initial state of the Universe, where the Cosmic background radiation was created. Its properties are well known by satellite experiments and serve as the starting point for the corresponding matter distribution. Using the physical laws of the currently known cosmologies, the evolution of matter as galaxies and black holes is simulated and recorded. This simulation was created and executed for the first time in 2005 by the Virgo consortium, an international group of astrophysicists from Germany, the UK, Canada, Japan and the USA. PLEASE READ: I screwed up! The Andromeda Galaxy is our closest: “spiral galaxy” (like our galaxy). Canis Major dwarf galaxy is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way. The three nearest known stars are gravitationally bound in a system commonly called Alpha Centauri. The two larger stars, said to be Sun-like, are named Alpha Centauri A and B. The nearest to us is the littlest and is called Proxima Centauri. It is classified as a red dwarf and contains just a fraction of the mass of our Sun. The three-star system is 4.36 light-years away, meaning light requires 4.36 years to travel from the stars to …