The Popular Science Team has posted a gallery from Lumina, a new simulation of the early universe built by a team at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. The work is described in a study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Lumina models how ordinary matter, dark matter, and radiation interacted during the universe’s first 2 billion years. It is the largest cosmological radiation-hydrodynamics simulation made so far, and running it took more than 15,000 graphics processing units. The renderings cover a stretch of the cosmic web about 650 million light-years across, with filaments marking dark matter and color marking where hydrogen and helium shifted into their modern ionized forms.

The point of all that compute is comparison. Astronomers can hold observations from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Roman Space Telescope up against Lumina’s predictions and see whether current theory still holds.…