Euclid Flagship Simulation

Credit: Joachim Stadel, UZH, Dept. of Astrophysics

As part of the development of the Euclid mission, it was critical to have a so called “Mock” Universe with galaxies, dark matter, dark energy, and neutrinos distributed in a virtual sky in as realistic a way as possible. This required a world record setting computer simulation of the Universe performed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center by researchers at the University of Zurich, Department of Astrophysics. In this image we see the white filamentary structure of the dark matter, large nearly empty regions of dark matter (so called “Voids”) and very high concentrations of dark matter at the intersections of the filaments (so called “Dark Matter Halos”). It is at these intersections that we would find clusters of galaxies, like the Perseus Cluster (shown in the image). Such virtual universes let us test methods of observation on data very much like what we expect from the real observations and determine, in advance, how well Euclid will be able to perform its mission.