Studying the thing you can never step outside of and look back at is the fundamental problem facing every cosmologist who has ever looked up at the night sky. The Universe is not a laboratory you can peer into from above, it’s the thing you are already inside. The only way to truly test your ideas about how it works is to build a copy of it, run the clock forward from the Big Bang, and see if what emerges matches what your telescopes are actually telling you. That is exactly what the FLAMINGO project has been doing. And this week, its creators made the results available to the entire world. An international team of astrophysicists, led by researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands, has released one of the largest cosmological simulation datasets ever produced. The archive contains more than 2.5 petabytes of data (roughly equivalent to half a million high definition films) and is free to access for researchers anywhere on the planet.…