Journey through galaxies and the web of dark matter in this mind-blowing simulation of the universe.

A new simulation of the universe is a map and a time machine rolled into one.

Called Uchuu, which is Japanese for "Outer Space," the map doesn't include Casseipoia or the moons of Neptune; instead, it's a map of large-scale galaxies and galaxy clusters, all glued together by an invisible web of dark matter, which emits no electromagnetic radiation but still exerts a gravitational force upon the universe.

Researchers from Chiba University in Japan, the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain, and several other institutions in Europe, the United States, Argentina, and Chile developed the simulation to study the universe's structure over almost its entire 13.8 billion-year history.

The simulation is a virtual cube, 9.63 billion light-years in each direction, containing 2.1 trillion simulated dark matter particles. It was constructed on the supercomputer ATERUI II at the National Astron

omical Observatory of Japan and took one year to set up.

To produce Uchuu required "all 40,200 processors (CPU cores) available [at the supercomputer] exclusively for 48 hours each month," Tomoaki Ishiyama, a computer scientist at Chiba University, said in a statement. "Twenty million hours of supercomputer time were consumed, and three petabytes of data were generated, the equivalent of 89478453 images from a 12-megapixel cell phone."

The researchers reported the new simulations in the June issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"Uchuu is like a time machine,' said Julia. F, a doctoral student at the Astrophysics Institute in Andalusia. Ereza said in the statement. "We can go forward, backward, and stop in time, we can 'zoom in' on a single galaxy or 'zoom out' to visualize a whole cluster, we can see what is happening at every instant and in every place of the universe from its earliest days to the present."