Cosmology Seminar Announcement

Prof. Andrey Kravtsov

University of Chicago

High-resolution cosmological simulations of galaxy clusters

Date: Thursday, May 19, 2005
416 Phy/Geo
Time: 12:10 pm.

Abstract:

I will describe high-resolution self-consistent cosmological simulations of clusters forming in the concordance Cold Dark Matter model with vacuum energy. The simulations follow dissipationless dark matter and stars and dissipative gasdynamics components and include a number of physical processes critical to galaxy formation (e.g., radiative cooling, star formation, stellar feedback and metal enrichment). Adaptive Mesh Refinement is used to greatly increase the resolution in the high density regions. The resolution of the simulations is sufficiently high to resolve formation and evolution of cluster galaxies and their impact on cluster gas. We use these simulations to study the effects of galaxy formation on the global properties of clusters, such as the shape of cluster dark matter halo and its density profile, the baryon fractions, gas density and temperature profiles. I will present comparisons of simulations results with the recent X-ray Chandra, Sunyaev-Zeldovich, and optical observations of clusters with highlights of both successes and problems of the models.


E-Mail: andrey@oddjob.uchicago.edu


Web Page: http://astro.uchicago.edu/~andrey/