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The COBE satellite that discovered these ripples was short-sighted—it had a very blurry vision of the early universe. The ripples that COBE saw were much larger than the scales of the initial galaxies, so we haven’t yet detected directly the progenitors of the galaxies in the large-scale structure in the microwave background, but we have discovered or we’ve directly imaged very closely related entities that correspond to larger structures today.
What goes into the computer simulation is the nature of the lumps that we’ve studied using the COBE satellite. And then the simulation follows the dynamic evolution of those small inhomegeneities as the universe expands and as it cools, taking these very tiny little lumps and making them grow bigger. As the process unfolds the lumps move around fairly quickly, and, as they do, some of them bump into each other and coalesce, and the computer follows these coalescences beautifully. Eventually one sees the mock universe grow from an almost, but not quite, homogeneous initial state to one which is really complex, irregular in structure and corresponding to the universe we see at the present day. |
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