July 15, 2009 -- A technique based on how brain neurons behave could dramatically speed up computer simulations of the universe, said U.K. researchers.
Cosmologists have long used computers to simulate what the universe looks like and how it evolved. But modelling the universe in detail is an extremely time consuming process.
Therefore researchers, led by postgraduate student Cesario Almeida from the University of Durham, have used an artificial neural network (ANN) to speed up the process of creating mock catalogues of galaxies.
Their findings appear on the arXiv physics website.
ANN simulates the way brain neurons connect and compute information, and it can be used to solve a range of astronomy, mathematics and engineering problems.
By comparing mock galactic catalogues with actual observations, such as the ATLAS sky survey currently being conducted by the Herschel space observatory, cosmologists can assess how well their models perform.
The observatory, which was launched into space in May 2009, will map 600 square degrees or just over 1 percent of the sky - an area that contains around one billion galaxies.
Related Content:
Current top-of-the-line computers would take around 100 years to recreate this area of sky.
Almeida and colleagues used the ANN to create their mock galactic catalogue in several wavelengths of light.
Overall, they found the ANN-derived universe matched previous, well-known models with an accuracy of between 80 and 90 percent. It was best at simulating galaxies in the near-infrared part of the spectrum.
"At all the wavelengths considered we find that the luminosity functions predicted by the ANN are in excellent agreement," they write.
Associate Professor Andrew Hopkins of the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney, says the technique could speed up research in the field of cosmology.
"It's certainly exciting that it can speed up this process," he says. "It opens up a new approach to try and attack these problems because it can work very quickly on a large number of simulated galaxies."
"It's an important cog in a very large wheel and sidesteps a lot of messy detail."
Related Links:
High-Speed Crash Makes Hot, 'Sterile' Galaxies
our sites
video
mobile
shop
stay connected
corporate
