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Simulations of the formation, evolution and clustering of galaxies and quasars

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 07:41 authored by Volker Springel, Simon D M White, Adrian Jenkins, Carlos S Frenk, Naoki Yoshida, Liang Gao, Julio Navarro, Robert Thacker, Darren Croton, John Helly, John A Peacock, Shaun Cole, Peter ThomasPeter Thomas, Hugh Couchman, August Evrard, Jörg Colberg, Frazer Pearce
The cold dark matter model has become the leading theoretical picture for the formation of structure in the Universe. This model, together with the theory of cosmic inflation, makes a clear prediction for the initial conditions for structure formation and predicts that structures grow hierarchically through gravitational instability. Testing this model requires that the precise measurements delivered by galaxy surveys can be compared to robust and equally precise theoretical calculations. Here we present a simulation of the growth of dark matter structure using 2160^3 particles, following them from redshift z = 127 to the present in a cube-shaped region 2.230 billion lightyears on a side. In postprocessing, we also follow the formation and evolution of the galaxies and quasars. We show that baryon-induced features in the initial conditions of the Universe are reflected in distorted form in the low-redshift galaxy distribution, an effect that can be used to constrain the nature of dark energy with future generations of observational surveys of galaxies.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Nature

ISSN

0028-0836

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

Issue

704

Volume

435

Page range

629-636

Pages

8.0

Department affiliated with

  • Physics and Astronomy Publications

Notes

A Virgo Consortium key project. Thomas helped to develop the hardware and software infrastructure and the project design. He also contributed to the paper content. This project has proved seminal for providing merger trees in cosmologically-representative volumes for semi-analytic modelling of galaxy formation. Over 300 ADS citations.

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-02-06

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