New Simulation Sheds Light on the Universe’s Origins

WHO:

Science Daily - The simulation is called Lumina.

CNN - An international research team developed Lumina; lead author Oliver Zier is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

CNN - Julian Muñoz, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, and Ilian Iliev, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, were not involved in the study.

CNN - NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is among the observatories used to observe distant, young galaxies.

WHAT:

Science Daily - Lumina simulates 2 billion years of early cosmic history across a region 1.6 billion light-years wide, revealing how the universe moved from its cosmic dark age toward a cosmos containing stars and galaxies.

CNN - Lumina models how the first stars and black holes drove reionization, a phase in which ultraviolet radiation stripped electrons from hydrogen atoms. This allowed light to travel farther and changed how galaxies formed.

CNN - Lumina covers more than 100 times as much space as earlier simulations and spans roughly 1.5 billion light-years in each direction. The article also describes the full simulation as 1.63 billion light-years across.

CNN - The simulation is the first to let researchers study changes in both hydrogen and helium in one model.

CNN - Zier said, “We have a cosmological volume where you can see this cosmic web, how galaxies are clustered. At the same time, we resolve individual galaxies.”

CNN - Zier said disagreements between Lumina’s results and telescope observations could indicate “something missing in our model” and “hints to missing physics.”

WHERE:

CNN - Lumina ran on Frontier, a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

WHEN:

CNN - The simulation took nearly three years to complete.

WHY:

CNN - The simulation is intended to help scientists investigate how the cosmos evolved and compare models of the early universe with telescope observations.

CNN - Its large scale can show regional differences in cosmic evolution and help researchers study rare galaxies and the movement of ordinary and dark matter.

HOW:

CNN - Lumina used more than 15,000 graphics processing units on Frontier.

CNN - The model depicts ordinary matter, dark matter, and radiation; differences in how ordinary matter and dark matter interact with light can leave patterns across millions of light-years.

CNN - Lumina has not been fully released to the public; videos show views zooming from individual galaxies out to larger cosmic scales.

(UPDATED November 12, 2026 05:59 UTC)

An international team developed Lumina, a vast simulation of the universe’s early evolution. It models how the first stars and black holes transformed hydrogen and helium. Researchers can compare its cosmic history with telescope observations, including Webb’s distant galaxies.