3min chapter

BBC Inside Science cover image

Mapping the universe

BBC Inside Science

CHAPTER

The Importance of Computers in Astronomy

Marnie Chesterton talks to Andrew Ponson, a cosmologist from UCL. His book is about how we have enlisted computers to help us understand the universe. The first use of computers in astronomy and cosmology was to simulate supernovae. They were simulated for two reasons: 1) To distinguish between an explosion in space caused by,. say, the USSR, testing one of their new weapons, versus an explosion that's just happened much, much brighter, but much further away. So it became actually essential to start using these computers. And so the way that simulations have evolved since those first days of computing has been very practical applications.

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