Joint Astrophysical Colloquium
Scale-dependent effects on the structure and dynamics of cosmic voids
Nico Schuster (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
Thursday 13/06/2024 @ 11:30, Sala Antonio Sollima (IV piano Battiferro)
We use the Magneticum suite of hydrodynamical simulations to identify cosmic voids based on the watershed technique and investigate their most fundamental properties across different resolutions in mass and scale, with additional comparisons between the hydrodynamical and dark matter only runs. This encompasses the distributions of void sizes, shapes, and content, as well as their radial density and velocity profiles traced by the distribution of both baryonic and cold dark matter particles as well as halos. Our results reveal that the analyzed void properties describe universal characteristics, which are largely independent of tracer type, resolution, and baryonic physics. Most notably, we find that the motion of tracers around void centers is perfectly described by linear dynamics, both for individual and stacked voids, down to voids of only a few Mpc in size. Similarly, we identify impacts of baryonic physics only in the smallest subset of voids. This suggests voids to be among the most pristine probes of cosmology down to scales that are commonly referred to as highly nonlinear in the field of large-scale structure and the minor impact of baryonic physics on void statistics.