Are you the romantic sort that feels a deeply personal sense of self-awareness when you spend a moment alone staring up at the stars? Ever since I was a wee lad I’ve looked through my grandpa’s high-powered telescope at his mountain cabin. The stars are beautiful up there away from the light pollution of the city. Through the lens of the telescope I could see craters on the moon, the rings of Saturn, and even the giant red spot on Jupiter. I felt like my gaze had no limit back then, but I was dead wrong. The Solar System is only the beginning.
In the deepest, darkest and densest regions of the universe (far from the eye of my simple store-bought telescope), groups of impossibly-huge galaxies have been observed pulling each other inward by the sheer force of their own gravitational pulls. Eventually, these galaxies merge into one giant super-structure known as a galaxy cluster. The world’s top cosmologists can observe pictures of these galaxy clusters, but that’s about it. As of now, we know very little about their astrophysical properties and scientists are forced to guess based on what they see through the lens of their telescopes. This conundrum is what motivated the scientists in the scientific journal I chose to read.
Inspired by recent innovations in what the team called “cosmological hydrodynamical simulations” the team in the journal were attempting to simulate the formation of a galaxy cluster using “protoclusters” (little man-made galaxies made to resemble the pictures we see of the actual galaxy clusters millions of light years away). They hoped that by doing this they could learn two things. One, the wanted to see exactly how accurate such simulations are when compared to real observations from a formation known as the Spider Web galaxy cluster. And two, they hoped to obtain valuable insight about all galaxy clusters’ formation and evolution. Using water as a model for the curvature of space time, they got to work.
In the end, their results were mixed. Both protocluster simulations showed evidence of an ongoing assembly of a dominating central galaxy, but in protocluster one (C1) they found that the projected velocities were too low compared with the actual observations of the Spider Web Galaxy. The results of protocluster two (C2) were a bit more optimistic, as they were relatively consistent with the empirical observations. So in conclusion there was one flop and one success. Looks like they’re going in the right direction, but aren’t quite there yet.
So if you feel a gravitational pull toward this field (excuse the pun), you should definitely check it out. Who knows, maybe with a few more pounds of information in your brain, you could be the next scientist to successfully re-create a galaxy cluster. After all, every step closer to galactic understanding is another step closer to a slimy green guy asking you to “take me to your leader.”
In the deepest, darkest and densest regions of the universe (far from the eye of my simple store-bought telescope), groups of impossibly-huge galaxies have been observed pulling each other inward by the sheer force of their own gravitational pulls. Eventually, these galaxies merge into one giant super-structure known as a galaxy cluster. The world’s top cosmologists can observe pictures of these galaxy clusters, but that’s about it. As of now, we know very little about their astrophysical properties and scientists are forced to guess based on what they see through the lens of their telescopes. This conundrum is what motivated the scientists in the scientific journal I chose to read.
Inspired by recent innovations in what the team called “cosmological hydrodynamical simulations” the team in the journal were attempting to simulate the formation of a galaxy cluster using “protoclusters” (little man-made galaxies made to resemble the pictures we see of the actual galaxy clusters millions of light years away). They hoped that by doing this they could learn two things. One, the wanted to see exactly how accurate such simulations are when compared to real observations from a formation known as the Spider Web galaxy cluster. And two, they hoped to obtain valuable insight about all galaxy clusters’ formation and evolution. Using water as a model for the curvature of space time, they got to work.
In the end, their results were mixed. Both protocluster simulations showed evidence of an ongoing assembly of a dominating central galaxy, but in protocluster one (C1) they found that the projected velocities were too low compared with the actual observations of the Spider Web Galaxy. The results of protocluster two (C2) were a bit more optimistic, as they were relatively consistent with the empirical observations. So in conclusion there was one flop and one success. Looks like they’re going in the right direction, but aren’t quite there yet.
So if you feel a gravitational pull toward this field (excuse the pun), you should definitely check it out. Who knows, maybe with a few more pounds of information in your brain, you could be the next scientist to successfully re-create a galaxy cluster. After all, every step closer to galactic understanding is another step closer to a slimy green guy asking you to “take me to your leader.”
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