Overview
- Researchers unveiled the peer-reviewed COLIBRE suite, a set of cosmological simulations that trace galaxy formation from the early universe to today.
- In a key shift from past work, the models track cold interstellar gas and multiple types of cosmic dust, which set where stars form and change how galaxies look in telescopes.
- The results reproduce many measured properties of real galaxies, including those seen very early by the James Webb Space Telescope, easing doubts raised by initial JWST finds.
- The project ran with the SWIFT code on Durham’s COSMA8 supercomputer, using up to 20 times more resolution elements than earlier suites and consuming 72 million CPU hours for the largest run.
- Open problems remain, since the simulations assume pre-existing black hole seeds and do not produce JWST’s mysterious “Little Red Dots,” so the team points to higher resolution and added physics as the next step while some top-resolution runs continue.