Topic
Numerical models of gravity, gas, and radiation used to follow how structure, stars, and galaxies form over cosmic time.
Megatron simulations suggest the region that became a Milky Way-like galaxy held thousands of small merging galaxies in the universe's first 2 billion years. Its galaxies come with predicted spectra that can be checked directly against James Webb Space Telescope data.
Reality
Researchers using the EAGLE universe simulations report in MNRAS that the Sun's place in the Milky Way's outskirts is about as good for life as locations get. The ranking rests on modeled hazards and assumed chemistry, so it says where conditions favor life and leaves open whether any life is there.
Reality
Harley Katz's team at the University of Chicago ran three years of simulations showing the Milky Way assembling from thousands of smaller galaxies. Published across six papers, the models can now be checked against what Webb actually records.
Reality
University of Bath-led MEGATRON team published four papers arguing early-universe models must track starlight, gas and new elements together. Their simulations suggest simpler models understate how stellar radiation and chemistry shape the gas around young galaxies.
Reality
A team led by Sunmyon Chon ran nested cosmological simulations on Japan's ATERUI III and got black holes growing dozens of times faster than anything can today, with properties the release says resemble Webb's dots.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Yale-led work in The Astrophysical Journal Letters ran the ASTRID simulation without fixing black holes to galactic centres. Mergers left them off-centre for billions of years, most often in the smallest galaxies.
Reality
Candidate pristine starbursts are turning up hundreds of millions of years after theory said they should have burned out. A new arXiv model asks whether ultraviolet radiation can hold the gas back that long, and whether JWST could see the result.
Reality