The new simulation tracks dark matter, galaxies, stars, and cosmic structures over the universe’s first 2 billion years, in greater detail and volume than ever before.
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Jennifer Chu|MIT News
Publication Date:
October 26, 2026
Press Contact:
Abby
Abazorius
Email:abbya@mit.edu
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Caption:
A composite image of Lumina’s scales of simulation, depicting (from left to right) the streaming velocities of subatomic particles and dark matter in the beginning of simulation; gas structures during helium reionization, color-coded by how fast the gas is moving; helium reionization where blue indicates regions that are ionized by supermassive black holes; and hydrogen reionization, where bright regions show bubbles where radiation from galaxies has ionized hydrogen, while the dark regions are still neutral.
Credits:
Credit: Lumina collaboration
With the Big Bang, the universe burst into existence as a hot and dense soup of electrons and subatomic particles. This primordial ionized plasma, initially smaller than a single atom, rapidly expanded and cooled. In the process, particles in the soup slowed enough to bind with electrons, forming electrically neutral hydrogen.
As this neutral hydrogen accumulated, the effect was like a shroud, preventing light and other forms of radiation from freely passing through. Around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was plunged into a cosmic “dark age.”
Now, a new computer simulation is giving scientists a detailed view of how the first galaxies, stars, and other structures could have unfolded from that time, to eventually pull the universe out of its dark age.
