Scientists created one of the largest simulations of our universe ever — about the size of 500,000 HD movies

Astronomers have unveiled one of the largest cosmological simulation datasets ever created, offering an expansive new tool to explore how the universe evolved across billions of years. Produced by the FLAMINGO project — short for Full-hydro Large-scale structure simulations with All-sky Mapping — the dataset contains more than 2.5 petabytes of data, an amount researchers say is roughly equivalent to half a million HD movies. The sheer scale of the release reflects a growing need in astronomy: matching increasingly precise observations with equally sophisticated theoretical models, according to a statement from the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA). Modern telescopes and sky surveys are capturing the universe in extraordinary detail, but interpreting that data requires simulations that can reproduce both the large-scale structure of the cosmos and the complex physics unfolding within galaxies. FLAMINGO was designed to bridge that gap. "These simulations allow us to follow the growth of cosmic structure across vast regions of space, while still modelling the complex physics of galaxy formation," Joop Schaye, co-author of the study from Leiden University, Netherlands, said in the statement . "By making the data publicly available, we hope researchers worldwide will use FLAMINGO to test new ideas about how the universe works." The simulations function as "virtual universes," beginning shortly after the Big Bang and evolving forward in time. …