By Mark Thompson
Publication Date: 2025-11-22 09:58:00
The Milky Way contains more than 100 billion stars, each following its own evolutionary path through birth, life and sometimes violent death. For decades, astrophysicists have dreamed of creating a complete simulation of our galaxy, a digital twin that could test theories about galaxy formation and evolution. This dream has always hit an impossible math wall.
Until now.
Researchers led by Keiya Hirashima at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences have achieved something that seemed unattainable: a simulation that represents every single one of these 100 billion stars over 10,000 years of galactic time. The breakthrough came through an unexpected marriage of artificial intelligence and traditional physics simulations, presented at this year’s Supercomputing conference.
The problem wasn’t just one of scale, although the numbers are frightening. Previous state-of-the-art galaxy simulations could handle about a billion solar masses,…
