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The Flamingo simulations are not only the largest but also the most all-encompassing simulations of the universe, from 13.75 billion years ago to today.
Led by Joop Schaye (Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands), the international Flamingo team simulated the evolution within an expanding volume of space — a cube with sides 10 billion light-years long. In this volume, they traced the gravitational clumping of no less than 300 billion particles, each with the mass of some 130 million solar masses, equivalent to an average dwarf galaxy.
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The simulations required a total of more than 50 million hours of computer time, distributed over the 30,000 processors that make up the DiRAC-COSMA8 supercomputer at Durham University in the UK. The results are published today in three papers in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.