A group of scientists may have stumbled upon a radical new way to do cosmology.
Cosmologists usually determine the composition of the universe by observing as much of it as possible. But these researchers have found that a machine learning algorithm can scrutinize a single simulated galaxy and predict the overall makeup of the digital universe in which it exists — a feat analogous to analysing a random grain of sand under a microscope and working out the mass of Eurasia. The machines appear to have found a pattern that might someday allow astronomers to draw sweeping conclusions about the real cosmos merely by studying its elemental building blocks.
“This is a completely different idea,” said Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute in New York and lead author of the work. “Instead of measuring these millions of galaxies, you can just take one. It’s really amazing that this works.”
It wasn’t supposed to. The improbable find grew out of an exercise Villaescusa-Navarro gave to Jupiter Ding, a Princeton University undergraduate: Build a neural network that, knowing a galaxy’s properties, can estimate a couple of cosmological attributes. The assignment was meant merely to familiarize Ding with machine learning. Then they noticed that the computer was nailing the overall density of matter.
“I thought the student made a mistake,” Villaescusa-Navarro said. “It was a little bit hard for me to believe, to be honest.”
The results of the investigation that followed appeared in a January 6 preprint that has been submitted for publication. The researchers analysed 2,000 digital universes generated by the Cosmology and Astrophysics with Machine Learning Simulations (CAMELS) project. These universes had a range of compositions, containing between 10% and 50% matter with the rest made up of dark energy, which drives the universe to expand faster and faster.
“That one galaxy can get [the density to] 10% or so, that was very surprising to me,” said Volker Springel, an expert in simulating galaxy formation at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics who was not involved in the research.
The team spent half a year trying to understand how the neural network had gotten so wise. They checked to make sure the algorithm hadn’t just found some way to infer the density from the coding of the simulation rather than the galaxies themselves. “Neural networks are very powerful, but they are super lazy,” Villaescusa-Navarro said.
Through a series of experiments, the researchers got a sense of how the algorithm was divining the cosmic density. By repeatedly retraining the network while systematically obscuring different galactic properties, they zeroed in on the attributes that mattered most.
The neural network found a much more precise and complicated relationship between 17 or so galactic properties and the matter density. This relationship persists despite galactic mergers, stellar explosions and black hole eruptions. “Once you get to more than [two properties], you can’t plot it and squint at it by eye and see the trend, but a neural network can,” said Shaun Hotchkiss, a cosmologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
The research does suggest that, in theory, an exhaustive study of the Milky Way and perhaps a few other nearby galaxies could enable an exquisitely precise measurement of our universe’s matter. Such an experiment, Villaescusa-Navarro said, could give clues to other numbers of cosmic import such as the sum of the unknown masses of the universe’s three types of neutrinos.
But in practice, the technique would have to first overcome a major weakness. The CAMELS collaboration cooks up its universes using two different recipes. A neural network trained on one of the recipes makes bad density guesses when given galaxies that were baked according to the other. The cross-prediction failure indicates that the neural network is finding solutions unique to the rules of each recipe. It certainly wouldn’t know what to do with the Milky Way, a galaxy shaped by the real laws of physics. Before applying the technique to the real world, researchers will need to either make the simulations more realistic or adopt more general machine learning techniques — a tall order.
“I’m very impressed by the possibilities, but one needs to avoid being too carried away,” Springel said.
But Villaescusa-Navarro takes heart that the neural network was able to find patterns in the messy galaxies of two independent simulations. The digital discovery raises the odds that the real cosmos may be hiding a similar link between the large and the small.
“It’s a very beautiful thing,” he said. “It establishes a connection between the whole universe and a single galaxy.”
Original post: https://www.quantamagazine.org/with-one-galaxy-ai-defines-a-whole-simulated-universe-20220120/
