Loading the simulated neighbourhood
Manticore-Local · a constrained simulation
The real sky, rebuilt from scratch. Eighty versions of the Universe were grown from the Big Bang until each one placed its galaxies where ours are. What you see is what they agree on.
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Everything in this sphere is simulated dark matter, grown from the early Universe to today. Its starting ripples were tuned until the matter landed where our surveys count galaxies; the clusters followed. The Milky Way is at the centre. Use the arrows, or ← and →, to fly out from home.
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The Milky Way sits at the centre of this simulation. It is not in it. Our galaxy, Andromeda and their companions span about three megaparsecs, less than one cell of the grid. What the simulation does know is the ground we stand on: the cell around us holds 0.9 times the average density of the Universe.
Each cell is 3.9 megaparsecs wide, about 13 million light-years. Nothing smaller than that is drawn here.
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Virgo's counterpart, 19 megaparsecs, 62 million light-years away, weighing 3.8 × 10¹⁴ Suns. It appears in 80 of 80 runs. The galaxies around us are falling toward it, and the simulation, built only from where galaxies are, has to grow a mass right here to pull them.
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On the other side of the sky, Fornax's counterpart: 20 megaparsecs, 65 million light-years away, 1.1 × 10¹⁴ Suns. It forms in 53 of 80 runs, and in some of those two halos compete for the same place. A lighter cluster is a less certain one.
Fornax's counterpart is too ambiguous for the authors' curated catalogue; it is shown from their full list.
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The Great Attractor region. Astronomers found it by its pull before they could see it, half hidden behind the dust of our own galaxy. Here it is a crowd: the counterparts of Centaurus (50 megaparsecs, 164 million light-years), Hydra (64 megaparsecs, 208 million light-years) and Norma (75 megaparsecs, 245 million light-years), the heaviest of the three at 1.0 × 10¹⁵ Suns.
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Perseus's counterpart, 76 megaparsecs, 247 million light-years away, 1.2 × 10¹⁵ Suns: the heaviest of the fourteen prominent clusters the simulation was checked against. It anchors the Perseus–Pisces chain, a ridge of clusters on the opposite side of the sky from the Great Attractor.
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Coma's counterpart, 106 megaparsecs, 346 million light-years away, 1.1 × 10¹⁵ Suns, with Leo's at 98 megaparsecs, 321 million light-years. In 1933 Fritz Zwicky measured how fast Coma's galaxies move and found they needed far more mass than shines. The simulation is mostly that missing mass.
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The survey of galaxies behind this simulation thins with distance, and its grip loosens with it. Near the edge: Shapley's 167 megaparsecs, 545 million light-years, the Hercules clusters, Abell 119 at 184 megaparsecs, 600 million light-years. Every glow in this sphere is a cluster that the realisations agree on, and none of them is a photograph.
An immersive, soothing voyage to abstract infinity awaits. Best with long, slow space-ambient music — whatever lets you drift — your screen full, and nothing asked of you for a while.