Millennium Simulation
Millennium Simulation: “The Largest Model of Our Universe”
This simulation was created and executed for the first time in 2005 by the Virgo consortium, an international group of astrophysicists from Germany, the UK, Canada, Japan and the USA.
The Millennium Run simulation starts with the initial state of the Universe, where the Cosmic background radiation was created. Its properties are well known by satellite experiments and serve as the starting point for the corresponding matter distribution. Using the physical laws of the currently known cosmologies, the evolution of matter as galaxies and black holes is simulated and recorded.
The simulation is a basic scientific tool to test theories in cosmology is to evaluate their consequences for the observable parts of the Universe. This includes, among other things, the distribution of matter (galaxies and intergalactic gas) as it is seen, now. Since looking further into the distance also means looking back in time, a meaningful test of the evolution of that distribution over time is possible.
PLEASE READ: The maker of this video screwed up – The three nearest known stars are gravitationally bound in a system commonly called Alpha Centauri. The two larger stars, said to be Sun-like, are named Alpha Centauri A and B. The nearest to us is the littlest and is called Proxima Centauri. It is classified as a red dwarf and contains just a fraction of the mass of our Sun.
The three-star system is 4.36 light-years away, meaning light requires 4.36 years to travel from the stars to Earth, and so we see them as they existed 4.36 years ago.
Astronomers announced that Alpha Centauri A is now calculated to be 1,061,000 miles wide (1,708,000 kilometers), or 1.227 times the size of the Sun. The B-star is 748,100 miles across (1,204,000 kilometers), or 0.865 times the Sun’s diameter. A parsec (symbol pc) is a unit of length used in astronomy. The length of the parsec is based on the method of trigonometric parallax, one of the oldest methods for measuring the distances to stars.
The name parsec stands for “parallax of one second of arc”, and one parsec is defined to be the distance from the Earth to a star that has a parallax of 1 arcsecond. The actual length of a parsec is approximately 3.262 light-years.
Music by;
Pink Floyd: “Learning to Fly” is the second song on Pink Floyd’s album A Momentary Lapse of Reason.
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