An incredible simulation has revealed the earliest moments of our universe as they have never been seen before.

This groundbreaking model, dubbed 'Lumina', captures exactly what happened in the first two billion years of our history following the Big Bang.

Lumina traces the bafflingly complex interactions between matter, dark matter and radiation, showing how the very first galaxies formed and shaped the universe around them.

Now, stunning images and videos have revealed what that would have looked like at a level of detail never before possible.

Renderings depicting the earliest moments of the universe capture how fine filaments of dark matter wove together with fast-moving gas to sculpt the first structures in the cosmos.

Scientists can even use Lumina to chart the processes by which gases like helium transformed into the states we witness today.

Dr Aaron Smith, a physicist from the University of Texas at Dallas and co-author of a paper on Lumina, says: 'We feel incredibly fortunate to be building simulations like Lumina.

'For the first time, we can follow along as both hydrogen and helium changed into their modern form across such an enormous volume of the universe, while still resolving the galaxies and other luminous objects driving that transformation.'

Created by scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Lumina is what scientists call a 'cosmological radiation-hydrodynamics simulation'.

That means it takes all of the best theories we have about how the universe's basic building blocks interact, and predicts how they would play out over time.

What makes Lumina special, however, is that it is the largest simulation of this kind ever created.

Lumina models a cube of space spanning some 1.5 billion light-years on each side, roughly equivalent to the scale astronomers can observe with today's most powerful telescopes.

That is also a 100 times greater volume than had been simulated by the previous best simulations of a similar kind.

Importantly, this is also the first simulation that allows scientists to study a phenomenon called helium reionisation.

The early universe was a hot soup of particles and radiation left over from the Big Bang.

As it cooled, electrons combined with atomic nuclei to make atoms that were electrically neutral.

However, after hundreds of millions of years, the first stars and galaxies began to form, producing enormous volumes of ultraviolet light that was strong enough to knock electrons off atoms and produce charged helium and hydrogen ions.

Using Lumina, scientists can finally study this process as it happens and immediately see how it influences the evolving universe within the model.

Creating Lumina required more than 15,000 graphics processing units running on Frontier, one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

That vast amount of computing power was required in order to model such a massive volume of the universe while maintaining a level of detail needed to study the formation of stars, galaxies and black holes.

This detail is critical because models like Lumina are now a core part of how scientists test their theories about the universe.

Lead author Dr Oliver Zier, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says: 'With the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the early universe has become an exciting new frontier in astrophysics.

'To understand what we are seeing with this telescope, we need to translate our theories into detailed predictions.'

Models allow scientists to see what the universe should look like according to our current best theories.

If observations from the JWST or the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope match what the simulation predicts, it gives scientists confidence that they are on the right track.

Likewise, if the observations don't match the model, it could be a sign that scientists need to rethink some of their assumptions about the universe.