An MIT-led team presented Lumina, a large computer simulation of the early universe, in a paper published October 26, 2026, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. According to MIT, the simulation follows cosmic evolution from the dark ages across roughly 2 billion years, covering a volume about 500 megaparsecs wide—described as 100 times larger in volume than previous simulations.

Lumina models dark matter, gas, stars and radiation together. The researchers reported that it captured both hydrogen re-ionization, attributed mainly to light from early galaxies and stars, and helium re-ionization, attributed to energetic accreting supermassive black holes. The team ran it on the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, using at peak the equivalent of more than 100,000 CPU cores and around 15,000 GPUs, according to researcher Xuejian Shen.

The simulations are not direct observations of the Big Bang. The team said it was making Lumina publicly available so its output could be compared with data from new and future telescopes, and said it planned to use the simulation to map early large-scale structure and to help predict gravitational-wave patterns from early galaxies and black holes.