Exploring the Cosmic Dawn with Supercomputers: Progress and Remaining Challenges

by Prof. Mike Norman (University of California, San Diego)

Tuesday 19 Mar 2019, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Berlin

New Seminar Room (MPE)

We review two decades of progress using the ENZO hydrodynamic cosmology code [1] to simulate the Cosmic Dawn [2], a period of roughly 1 billion years beginning with the formation of the first stars in the universe, and ending with cosmic reionization. Using simulations of increasing size and complexity, working up in length and mass scale and to lower redshifts, feeding the results from one scale into the next, a connected narrative is built up covering the entire epoch. Topics include the formation of primordial stars, the transition to second generation star formation, the assembly of the first galaxies and their role in cosmic reionization. We also discuss the formation and growth of stellar and supermassive black holes in the early universe. We highlight physical difficulties that will require new, more physically complex simulations to address. Finally, we discuss technical advances in hardware and software that will enable a new class of more realistic simulations to be carried out on exascale supercomputers in the future.

References

[1] ENZO: An Adaptive Mesh Refinement Code for Astrophysics, G. L. Bryan et al., Astrophysical Journal Supplement, 211, id.19, (2014), http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014ApJS..211...19B

[2] Simulating the Cosmic Dawn with Enzo, M. L. Norman, B. Smith, & J. Bordner, Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, Vol. 5, id.34, (2018), http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018FrASS...5...34N