Washington, DC (4 June 1998)-A news story by James Glanz in the 5 June 1998 issue of Science reports that a team of astrophysicists and computer scientists have for the first time captured the entire observable universe in a computer simulation. The simulation depicts how gravity could have gathered ripples left by the big bang into the colossal structures that now fill space. This feat was accomplished by a multinational team called the Virgo Consortium using a 512-processor Cray supercomputer at the Max Planck Society's computing center in Garching, Germany. With this unprecedented model of the universe, researchers hope to better interpret data from large surveys of the real sky and understand the rarest and largest structures in the cosmos.
The following members of the Virgo Consortium are available to comment:
| August Evrard University of Michigan |
evrard@umich.edu 743-764-4366 |
| Carlos Frenk Durham University |
C.S.Frenk@durham.ac.uk |
| Simon White Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics |
swhite@mpa-garching.mpg.de |
(NOTE: Frenk and White are now at the Aspen Center for Physics: 970-925-2585)
| Joerg Colberg Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics |
jgc@mpa-garching.mpg.de (49) 89-3299-3212 |
| Adrian Jenkins Durham University |
a.r.jenkins@durham.ac.uk (44) 191-374-4611 |
| Tom Macfarland (Cray programmer) EDS |
macfarland@eds.com 212-597-5565 |
For a copy of this news article, contact the AAAS News & Information Office at 202-326-6440 or by email at scipak@aaas.org. Please cite Science as the source of this news item.
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