Washington, Dec 7: After decades of intense research, scientists have come up with a complex computer code that could bring us a significant step closer to understanding the fundamental constituents of the universe.

The study was done using the help of a supercomputer, that crammed 2.5 percent of the visible universe inside it to model a region more than 1.5 billion light-years across.

Among its many hypothesis, it suggests that much of the gaseous mass of the universe is bound up in a tangled web of cosmic filaments that stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years.

“The study indicated a significant portion of the gas is in the filaments, which connect galaxy clusters (hidden from direct observation) in enormous gas clouds in intergalactic space known as the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium, or WHIM, ” said Jack Burns, Professor from CU (University of Colorado), Boulder.

“It took the researchers nearly a decade to produce the extraordinarily complex computer code that drove the simulation, which incorporated virtually all of the known physical conditions of the universe reaching back in time almost to the Big Bang, ” said Burns.

The simulation, which uses advanced numerical techniques to zoom-in on interesting structures in the universe, modeled the motion of matter as it collapsed due to gravity and became dense enough to form cosmic filaments and galaxy structures.

"We see this as a real breakthrough in terms of technology and in scientific advancement, " said Burns.

“According to the standard cosmological model, the universe consists of about 25 percent dark matter and 70 percent dark energy around 5 percent normal matter, ” said Burns.

Normal matter consists primarily of baryons - hydrogen, helium and heavier elements. Observations show that about 40 percent of the baryons are currently unaccounted for.

“Many astrophysicists believe the missing baryons are in the WHIM”, said Burns.

"In the coming years, I believe these filaments may be detectable in the WHIM using new state-of-the-art telescopes, " said Burns. "We think that as we begin to see these filaments and understand their nature, we will learn more about the missing baryons in the universe, " he added.

Two of the key telescopes that astrophysicists will use in their search for the WHIM are the 10-meter South Pole Telescope in Antarctica and the 25-meter Cornell-Caltech Atacama Telescope (CCAT), being built in Chile's Atacama Desert.

The CCAT telescope will gather radiation from sub-millimeter wavelengths, which are longer than infrared waves but shorter than radio waves. “It will enable astronomers to peer back in time to when galaxies first appeared (just a billion years or so after the Big Bang), allowing them to probe the infancy of the objects and the process by which they formed, ” said Burns.

“The South Pole Telescope looks at millimeter, sub-millimeter and microwave wavelengths of the spectrum and is used to search for, among other things, cosmic microwave background radiation, that are the cooled remnants of the Big Bang, ” said Burns.

Researchers hope to use the telescopes to estimate heating of the cosmic background radiation as it travels through the WHIM, using the radiation temperature changes as a tracer of sorts for the massive filaments. (ANI)