Galaxy Clusters and The Dark Energy

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AST 0205010WhiteCosmology has made tremendous advances in the past decade, with many fundamental questions approaching resolution. We now have a highly predictive theory for the emergence of large-scale structure in the Universe. As is often the case, this theory raises new questions, and several crucial issues still remain to be understood. First, the nature of most of the matter in the Universe remains mysterious. Second, while we have known for some time that earthly matter doesn't dominate the energy in the Universe, we now believe that not even exotic `dark' matter plays that role. At present the Universe appears to be accelerating, driven by a mysterious component dubbed "dark energy''. Luckily we are in a "golden era'' of cosmological observations. Upcoming observations will soon constrain the initial conditions for structure formation and many cosmological parameters, allowing us to address the next frontier: the era of structure formation. A thorough understanding of structure formation is instrumental in determining both the consequences of the developing 'cosmic web' paradigm and the constraints on variations within this paradigm. The key to this understanding is clusters of galaxies. These are the largest known objects. They exhibit remarkable regularity, but our understanding of their structure is sensitive to our modeling assumptions. This project will construct computer models of galaxy clusters to develop and refine methods which will relate the properties of these clusters to the distribution and nature of the dark matter and the dark energy and thus to sharpen our tests of this dominant paradigm.***