Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 689, Issue 2, Pages 1063-1077Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1086/592496
Keywords
cosmic rays; cosmology: theory; hydrodynamics; methods: numerical
Categories
Funding
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien
- Division Of Astronomical Sciences [0807215] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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We present new results characterizing cosmological shocks within adaptive mesh refinement N-body/hydrodynamic simulations that are used to predict nonthermal components of large-scale structure. This represents the first study of shocks using adaptive mesh refinement. We propose a modified algorithm for finding shocks from those used on unigrid simulations that reduces the shock frequency of low Mach number shocks by a factor of similar to 3. We then apply our new technique to a large, 512 h(-1) Mpc)(3), cosmological volume and study the shock Mach number M) distribution as a function of preshock temperature, density, and redshift. Because of the large volume of the simulation, we have superb statistics that result from having thousands of galaxy clusters. We find that the Mach number evolution can be interpreted as a method to visualize large-scale structure formation. Shocks with M < 5 typically trace mergers and complex flows, while 5 < M 20 and M 20 generally follow accretion onto filaments and galaxy clusters, respectively. By applying results from nonlinear diffusive shock acceleration models using the first-order Fermi process, we calculate the amount of kinetic energy that is converted into cosmic-ray protons. The acceleration of cosmic-ray protons is large enough that in order to use galaxy clusters as cosmological probes, the dynamic response of the gas to the cosmic rays must be included in future numerical simulations.
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