CS 224W Final Project: Predicting Galactic Properties from Network Structure of Cosmological Simulations

This project focuses on an application of network science to the field of cosmology, one of the less well-explored cross-domain collaborations. Cosmological simulations aim to reproduce the evolution of the universe, from its early homogeneous state 13.8 billion years ago, to the current highly inhomogeneous arrangement of galaxies separated by large voids of intergalactic space. In recent years, as computational power has increased exponentially quickly, the granularity and detail of cosmological simulations has likewise improved. Since the earliest large-scale gravitational N-body simulations in 1985 [1], cosmologists have been tweaking their models to better simulate the observed universe. The influential Millennium simulations [7] used N-body simulations coupled with smoothed particle hydrodynamics, which models the fluid behavior of gases, to better resolve small-scale structure.