Open access to the universe

A team of scientists generated a giant cosmic simulation—and now they're giving it away. A small team of astrophysicists and computer scientists have created some of the highest-resolution snapshots yet of a cyber version of our own cosmos. Called the Dark Sky Simulations, they’re among a handful of recent simulations that use more than 1 trillion virtual particles as stand-ins for all the dark matter that scientists think our universe contains.  They’re also the first trillion-particle ...