Scientists use the Frontier supercomputer to reveal how black holes and magnetic fields keep galaxy clusters stable for billions of years.
It takes the fastest machine on Earth to simulate the largest structures in the universe.Scientists have turned to Frontier, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, to uncover how galaxy clusters regulate the immense energy from supermassive black holes .
The breakthrough offers the clearest picture yet of how these cosmic giants survive for billions of years without collapsing.Black holes, billions of times more massive than the Sun, power blazing engines called active galactic nuclei. These nuclei pump heat, dust, and gas into their environments, some circling in bright accretion disks, while some escape far beyond the galaxy’s edges.“Fundamentally, we set out to understand how these galaxies regulate themselves over the age of the universe,” said Brian O’Shea, a computational astrophysicist at Michigan State University and co-author of the study.Simulating a cosmic stormTo test this, the researchers simulated a black hole with a billion solar masses at the center of a galaxy cluster weighing a quadrillion Suns, a thousand times the Milky Way’s mass. They modeled the system’s evolution across billions of years, tracking cycles of black hole jet activity.“These jets are extremely fast, so fast that even with Frontier’s power we had to artificially limit their speed in the simulation to about 5% of the speed of light,” said Philipp Grete, a computational astrophysicist at the Hamburg Observatory in Germany.“That still resulted in the simulations taking about 2 million steps to complete.”The project demanded 700,000 node hours and more than 17,000 GPUs using AthenaPK, an open-source astrophysical code. No other machine could handle the sheer scale and detail of the work.“One of the long-standing questions we’ve had is whether these systems can stay stable across billions of years,” Grete said.“The only way to do this at all was on a machine not just with lots of memory plus storage to host the data but with enough GPU computing power to deliver a fast turnover.”Filaments of mystery solvedFrontier’s 2-exaflop speed, equal to two quintillion calculations per second, revealed new details about gas filaments surrounding galaxy clusters. These filaments have long been observed in real clusters like Perseus but never before reproduced in a simulation.“We’re the first study ever to reproduce this phenomenon,” O’Shea said.“Their formation had been a mystery, but now we know how they come to be: through the turbulence created by the interaction of these cold gases with the hot intergalactic plasma — some of it as hot as 100 million Kelvins — and the magnetic fields that surround them.”The findings suggest galaxy clusters rely on magnetic fields to regulate energy and maintain stability. The team hopes to extend the work by adding more physics, including cosmic rays and plasma effects.“As we increase our understanding of these phenomena, there could be lessons learned that apply not just to galaxy clusters but to supernovae and even to the turbulence found in fusion tokamaks,” O’Shea said.The findings of the study have been published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Astrophysics Black Holes Frontier Supercomputer Fusion Energy Galaxy Clusters Gas Filaments Magnetic Fields
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