Numerical simulations in gravitation and astrophysics are computational techniques that solve the governing equations of gravitational dynamics—typically Einstein’s field equations of general relativity or the Newtonian/relativistic N-body problem—using discretization schemes such as finite difference, finite volume, spectral, or particle-based methods. They enable quantitative modeling of systems like compact-object binaries, gravitational-wave sources, stellar evolution, accretion flows, galaxy formation, and large-scale structure. These simulations incorporate additional physics (e.g., magnetohydrodynamics, radiation transport, nuclear microphysics) and employ high-performance computing, adaptive mesh refinement, and sophisticated time-integration algorithms to resolve multi-scale, nonlinear phenomena inaccessible to purely analytic approaches.
Surprisingly, some of the universe's brightest objects are black holes. As scorching gas and dust flow around and into a black hole, they glow with fierce intensity across the light spectrum. Now, a team of computational ...
Astronomy
Dec 3, 2025
0
36
Dark matter and its impact on cosmology have puzzled physicists for nearly a century. At Perimeter Institute, two researchers are trying to better understand how one potential dark matter candidate, self-interacting dark ...
Astronomy
Dec 1, 2025
0
22
Researchers have successfully performed the world's first Milky Way simulation that accurately represents more than 100 billion individual stars over the course of 10 thousand years. This feat was accomplished by combining ...
Astronomy
Nov 17, 2025
4
1709
SXS—Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes—is an ongoing scientific collaboration that has been generating simulations of dramatic events in space, particularly mergers of binary black hole systems, for several decades. Recently, ...
Astronomy
Oct 9, 2025
0
46
Gravitational waves are energy-carrying waves produced by the acceleration or disturbance of massive objects. These waves, which were first directly observed in 2015, are known to be produced during various cosmological phenomena, ...
A hundred years before the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration released the first image of a black hole in 2019—located at the heart of the galaxy M87—astronomer Heber Curtis had already discovered a strange jet protruding ...
Astronomy
Oct 6, 2025
0
104
To probe the mysteries of how galaxies evolve over time, scientists needed a supercomputer with out-of-this-world computational power.
Astronomy
Oct 1, 2025
0
31
The consortium running the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid mission has published the most extensive simulation of the cosmos to date. The modeling was based on algorithms developed by UZH professor Joachim Stadel.
Astronomy
Sep 23, 2025
0
193
An international research collaboration has used advanced computer simulations to investigate how faint radio signals from the early universe, soon to be observed from missions on the far side of the moon, could shed light ...
Astronomy
Sep 17, 2025
1
25
Over the course of more than two decades, researchers at the University of Bern have developed the so-called "Bern model," a suite of computer programs that can numerically simulate the formation of planetary systems, thus ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 9, 2025
0
24
