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Session 53 - The X Clusters: Cooling Flows.
Display session, Thursday, January 08
Exhibit Hall,
We are assembling the first statistically-complete catalogs of numerically-evolved clusters with reliable X-ray luminosities through a series of high-resolution, gas+N-body cosmological simulations. A random sample of \sim100 clusters spanning a mass range of almost 2 orders of magnitude has been chosen from an initial low-resolution simulation of a volume 256h^-1 Mpc on a side. These clusters are then evolved at high spatial and mass resolution (\sim15h^-1 kpc and 10^10h^-1 M_ødot, respectively) using the adaptive mesh-refinement code of Bryan amp; Norman (1998). The clusters in our first catalog are evolved assuming only adiabatic physics; the second catalog will include additional important effects such as radiative cooling and galaxy feedback. The flat \Lambda+CDM cosmological model we assume (Ømega_0 = 0.3, h=0.7) is an excellent fit to all observational constraints but other models are being investigated through simulations of smaller samples.
This numerical catalog will result in definitive predictions for the evolution of the cluster X-ray luminosity function (XLF) and temperature function. The results will also be used to determine the amount and frequency of cluster substructure as well as the numbers and strengths (or even existence) of cluster cooling flows. The simulated cluster catalogs will be placed in a digital archive under construction at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications where they will be available to other researchers via the Internet/WWW.
