Untangling the complexity of cosmic flows (in galaxy clusters): accretion, mergers, shock waves and turbulence
David Vallès-Pérez (Universitat de Valencia)
Monday 18/10/2021 @ 14:00, Sala IV piano Battiferro
Being the most massive bound objects, and having formation timescales comparable to the age of the Universe, galaxy clusters are outstanding objects to deepen our knowledge on cosmological structure formation and evolution, and to study many astrophysical scenarios. In particular, the outskirts of galaxy clusters are especially interesting places, where matter (both dark and baryonic) is infalling to the cluster and settling in equilibrium within the deep gravitational potential of the cluster. In these regions, which will be able to be observationally probed in several wavelength ranges in the next one to two decades, structure formation processes (mergers and smooth accretion of gas) trigger many interesting hydrodynamic phenomena, such as turbulence and a diverse phenomenology of shock waves. In this seminar, I will present some results on the characterization of these processes, obtained with the aid of state-of-the-art numerical simulations produced with the cosmological code MASCLET. Last, I also summarize some recent results from the analysis of matter flows in and around cosmic voids.