Scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have created Lumina, one of the largest and most detailed simulations ever made of the early universe. Its images show the cosmic web as fine filaments of dark matter, with warm orange and yellow tones where gas moves fastest between galaxy clusters, and cyan regions where helium changed into its modern form.
Lumina recreates how ordinary matter, dark matter and radiation interacted during the universe's first 2 billion years. It covers a cube about 1.5 billion light-years on each side, more than 100 times the volume of earlier comparable simulations, and it is the first to capture helium reionization as it happened. Running it took more than 15,000 graphics processors on the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Astronomers will compare its predictions with observations from JWST and the Roman Space Telescope. The work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Source: Phys.org (Smithsonian), October 25, 2026 — https://phys.org/news/2026-10-lumina-simulation-early-universe-life.html
