Gallery of movies
Hierarchical growth of a galaxy cluster, and turbulence production by minor mergers
I produced two movies on the evolution of a single galaxy cluster from the hydrodynamical simulations described in the Maier et al. paper (ApJ 707 (2009), 40). The visualisation makes use of volume rendering of the baryon density field, performed with the yt toolkit. Thanks to the computational support at the Leibniz Computing Center (in particular, to Helmut Satzger) for invaluable help with storing more than 500 datadumps from my simulation (about 0.5 TB of data, 1.5 million files) and with the parallelisation of the data analysis. I will be happy to share the details of my analysis (scripts, parallelisation strategy, movie creation) with interested readers!The first movie shows a volume rendering of baryon density from redshift 4, centered on a forming cluster. Accretion of subclumps and inflow from filaments can be clearly seen.
(AVI file, 25 MB; link on Vimeo.)In the second movie there are two panels: on the left-hand side is a volume rendering of baryon overdensity, whereas in the right-hand side a projection of SGS turbulence energy is shown. The comparison demonstrates the close link between cluster growth by mergers and turbulence injection in the intra-cluster medium.
(AVI file, 41 MB; link on Vimeo.)