Hydrodynamical Simulations of Cosmic Structure Formation

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Understanding how structure grows in the universe is one of the key challenges in modern cosmology. It allows us to better understand the origin of galaxies and galaxy clusters, as well as probe the nature of fundamental constituents of our Universe such as the dark matter and dark energy. The growth of structure is a highly non-linear process and, while driven by gravity, requires a range of astrophysical processes to be modelled such as radiative cooling, star formation and strong energy outflows (feedback) from stars and super-massive black holes. Massive progress is being made with these models using hydrodynamical simulations, thanks to the rapid advances in both software(simulation codes) and hardware (massively-parallel computing clusters). In this project, the student will have the opportunity to participate in developing, running and analysing such simulations. They will be able to work as part of the Virgo consortium, an international collaboration of computational cosmologists. In Manchester, our work is mainly focused on comparing simulations of galaxy clusters with the latest multi-wavelength observations (e.g. cluster galaxies; using X-rays and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects to study the hot gas; and gravitational lensing to study the dark matter).