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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Astrophysics and Astronomy

University of Massachusetts Amherst

1998

Large-scale structure of universe

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Recovery Of The Power Spectrum Of Mass Fluctuations From Observations Of The Ly Alpha Forest, Rac Croft, Dh Weinberg, N Katz, L Hernquist Jan 1998

Recovery Of The Power Spectrum Of Mass Fluctuations From Observations Of The Ly Alpha Forest, Rac Croft, Dh Weinberg, N Katz, L Hernquist

Astronomy Department Faculty Publication Series

We present a method to recover the shape and amplitude of the power spectrum of mass fluctuations, P(k), from observations of the high-redshift Lyα forest. The method is motivated by the physical picture that has emerged from hydrodynamic cosmological simulations and related semianalytic models, in which typical Lyα forest lines arise in a diffuse, continuous, fluctuating intergalactic medium. The thermal state of this low-density gas (δρ/ρ 10) is governed by simple physical processes, which lead to a tight correlation between the Lyα optical depth and the underlying matter density. To recover the mass power spectrum, we (1) …


Cosmological Simulations With Scale-Free Initial Conditions. I. Adiabatic Hydrodynamics, Jm Owen, Dh Weinberg, Ae Evrard, L Hernquist, N Katz Jan 1998

Cosmological Simulations With Scale-Free Initial Conditions. I. Adiabatic Hydrodynamics, Jm Owen, Dh Weinberg, Ae Evrard, L Hernquist, N Katz

Astronomy Department Faculty Publication Series

We analyze hierarchical structure formation based on scale-free initial conditions in an Einstein-de Sitter universe, including a baryonic component with Ωbary = 0.05. We present three independent, smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations, performed at two resolutions (323 and 643 dark matter and baryonic particles) and with two different SPH codes (TreeSPH and P3MSPH). Each simulation is based on identical initial conditions, which consist of Gaussian-distributed initial density fluctuations that have a power spectrum P(k) k-1. The baryonic material is modeled as an ideal gas subject only to shock heating and adiabatic heating …