Washington DC, Nov. 17 -- Researchers combined deep learning with high-resolution physics to create the first Milky Way model that tracks over 100 billion stars individually.

Researchers led by Keiya Hirashima at the RIKEN Centre for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan, working with partners from the University of Tokyo and Universitat de Barcelona in Spain, have created the first Milky Way simulation capable of tracking more than 100 billion individual stars across 10 thousand years of evolution.

Their AI learned how gas behaves after supernovae, removing one of the biggest computational bottlenecks in galactic modelling. The result is a simulation hundreds of times faster than current methods.

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