These visualizations show the number and clustering of simulated galaxies at different cosmic ages, ranging from 4% to 43% of the universe’s current age of 13.8 billion years. Each cube represents a fixed volume of space about 100 million light-years per side. Over the sequence, the expansion of the universe quickly lowers the density of galaxies. Each cube shows a specific cosmological redshift, from 9 to 1, with earlier cubes cast in redder shades.
The visualizations use data from a realistic simulation developed by Zhongxu Zhai and Yun Wang at IPAC and Andrew Benson at Carnegie Observatories to investigate the expected precison and accuracy of the High Latitude Spectroscopic Survey from NASA’s Roman Space Telescope. The full simulation contains 65 million galaxies.