Next generation hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy clusters

Galaxy clusters host the most massive galaxies in the Universe, with stellar masses up to one trillion times the mass of the Sun. These galaxies are surrounded by huge reservoirs of hot, X-ray emitting plasma, with temperatures over 10 million Kelvin. A puzzling observation, however, is that this gas is not cooling down and forming new stars at the expected rate - why does star formation shut down in massive galaxies?

One, currently favoured, answer is that the gas is being kept hot by an active galactic nucleus (AGN) through the emission of powerful jets of radio-bright relativistic plasma. The AGN, powered by accretion on to a super-massive black hole, is energetically capable of counteracting the radiative losses in the X-ray gas and can even drive some of the gas out of the system altogether.

Modern hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy clusters attempt to include the effects of this so-called AGN feedback process and can successfully model the shut-down of star formation in brightest cluster galaxies, while producing black holes with observationally-reasonable masses. However, these simulations currently struggle to reproduce the X-ray thermal properties of the gas, predicting material that tends to be too hot and diffuse in the cluster core.

Such a discrepancy is likely the result of current models not capturing all the essential physics but may also be due to insufficient numerical resolution.

In this PhD project, the student will join ongoing collaborative efforts to develop a new generation of cluster simulations with improved resolution and physics modelling using the SWIFT hydrodynamics code (swift.dur.ac.uk). They will work on science projects involving the analysis of new simulation data as well as have the opportunity to help develop and test new simulation models. The student will join the Virgo consortium and use the DiRAC high performance computing facility (dirac.ac.uk).