Engineering360: "Supercomputer Performs Largest-ever Virtual Universe Simulation"

So the virtual galaxies are represented by an average of just 80 particles each?

Quick answer to your question: Yes, 80 particles is indeed enough to identify the location and mass of a galaxy using the model. The actual properties of the galaxy placed within such a small halo are calibrated to match the current observations. This is a statistical challenge which allows room for improvement, but the current methods are already very sophisticated. What has to be remembered is that the underlying dynamics of the main "dark actors" in the universe (dark matter, dark energy, neutrinos) are being calculated fully self-consistently using the PKDGRAV3 code. This then provides a very accurate "scaffolding" for the distribution of the galaxies, whose properties still need to be set by a model. In the future supercomputers may be able to directly simulate the creation and evolution of galaxies within such large volumes of the Universe, but at present this impossible. So an appreciation of the enormous challenge presented to us by the visible Universe is needed to assess our work, which aims to get right all the physics we can simulate directly and to use the best models to match the remaining galactic properties. Keep questioning, and you are with us! Regards, Joachim Stadel.

Dr. Stadel, thank you for personally answering this question. What a pleasant surprise.

Sort of like children playing in the mud.

At the college level anyway.