1,721,171 research outputs found
On the complexity and the information content of cosmic structures
Full text linkThe emergence of cosmic structure is commonly considered one of the most complex phenomena in nature. However, this complexity has never been defined nor measured in a quantitative and objective way. In this work, we propose a method to measure the information content of cosmic structure and to quantify the complexity that emerges from it, based on Information Theory. The emergence of complex evolutionary patterns is studied with a statistical symbolic analysis of the datastream produced by state-of-the-art cosmological simulations of forming galaxy clusters. This powerful approach allows us to measure how many bits of information is necessary to predict the evolution of energy fields in a statistical way, and it offers a simple way to quantify when, where and how the cosmic gas behaves in complex ways. The most complex behaviours are found in the peripheral regions of galaxy clusters, where supersonic flows drive shocks and large energy fluctuations over a few tens of million years. Describing the evolution of magnetic energy requires at least twice as large amount of bits as required for the other energy fields. When radiative cooling and feedback from galaxy formation are considered, the cosmic gas is overall found to double its degree of complexity. In the future, Cosmic Information Theory can significantly increase our understanding of the emergence of cosmic structure as it represents an innovative framework to design and analyse complex simulations of the Universe in a simple, yet powerful way
How complex is the cosmic web?
Full text linkThe growth of large-scale cosmic structure is a beautiful exemplification of how complexity can emerge in our Universe, starting from simple initial conditions and simple physical laws. Using ENZO cosmological numerical simulations, I applied tools from Information Theory (namely, `statistical complexity') to quantify the amount of complexity in the simulated cosmic volume, as a function of cosmic epoch and environment. This analysis can quantify how much difficult to predict, at least in a statistical sense, is the evolution of the thermal, kinetic, and magnetic energy of the dominant component of ordinary matter in the Universe (the intragalactic medium plasma). The most complex environment in the simulated cosmic web is generally found to be the periphery of large-scale structures (e.g. galaxy clusters and filaments), where the complexity is on average ̃10-102 times larger than in more rarefied regions, even if the latter dominate the volume-integrated complexity of the simulated Universe. If the energy evolution of gas in the cosmic web is measured on a ≈100 kpc h^{-1} resolution and over a ≈200 Myr time-scale, its total complexity is in the range of ̃ 10^{16}-10^{17} bits, with little dependence on the assumed gas physics, cosmology, or cosmic variance
Weighing galaxy clusters with shocks
No full textGiant shock waves at the physical boundaries of the most massive structures in the Universe could be used as an accurate tool to measure the total mass of clusters of galaxies
A survey of the thermal and non-thermal properties of cosmic filaments
Full text linkIn this paper, we exploit a large suite of ENZO cosmological magneto-hydrodynamical simula- tions adopting uniform mesh resolution, to investigate the properties of cosmic filaments under different baryonic physics and magnetogenesis scenarios. We exploit a isovolume based algo- rithm to identify filaments and determine their attributes from the continuous distribution of gas mass density in the simulated volumes. The global (e.g. mass, size, mean temperature and magnetic field strength, enclosed baryon fraction) and internal (e.g. density, temperature, ve- locity and magnetic field profiles) properties of filaments in our volume are calculated across almost four orders of magnitude in mass. The inclusion of variations in non-gravitational physical processes (radiative cooling, star formation, feedback from star forming regions and active galactic nuclei) as well as in the seeding scenarios for magnetic fields (early magnetisa- tion by primordial process vs later seeding by galaxies) allows us to study both the large-scale thermodynamics and the magnetic properties of the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium (WHIM) with an unprecedented detail. We show how the impact of non-gravitational physics on the global thermodynamical properties of filaments is modest, with the exception of the densest gas environment surrounding galaxies in filaments. Conversely, the magnetic properties of the WHIM in filament are found to dramatically vary as different seeding scenarios are con- sidered. We study the correlation between the properties of galaxy-sized halos and their host filaments, as well as between the halos and the local WHIM in which they lie. Significant general statistical trends are reported
Analytical model for cluster radio relics
Full text linkRadio relics are vast synchrotron sources that sit on the outskirts of merging galaxy clusters. In this work we model their formation using a Press-Schechter formalism to simulate merger rates, analytical models for the intracluster medium and the shock dynamics, as well as a simple model for the cosmic-ray electrons at the merger shocks. We show that the statistical properties of the population of radio relics are strongly dependent on key physical parameters, such as the acceleration efficiency, the magnetic field strength at the relic, the geometry of the relic and the duration of the electron acceleration at merger shocks. It turns out that the flux distribution as well as the power-mass relation can constrain key parameters of the intracluster medium. With the advent of new large-area radio surveys, statistical analyses of radio relics will complement what we have learned from observations of individual objects
Multiwavelength cross-correlation analysis of the simulated cosmic web
Full text linkWe used magnetohydrodynamical cosmological simulations to investigate the cross-correlation between different observables (i.e. X-ray emission, Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) signal at 21 cm, HI temperature decrement, diffuse synchrotron emission, and Faraday Rotation) as a probe of the diffuse matter distribution in the cosmic web. We adopt a uniform and simplistic approach to produce synthetic observations at various wavelengths, and we compare the detection chances of different combinations of observables correlated with each other and with the underlying galaxy distribution in the volume. With presently available surveys of galaxies and existing instruments, the best chances to detect the diffuse gas in the cosmic web outside of haloes is by cross-correlating the distribution of galaxies with SZ observations. We also find that the cross-correlation between the galaxy network and the radio emission or the Faraday Rotation can already be used to limit the amplitude of extragalactic magnetic fields, well outside of the cluster volume usually explored by existing radio observations, and to probe the origin of cosmic magnetism with the future generation of radio surveys
Convolutional deep denoising autoencoders for radio astronomical images
Full text linkWe apply a Machine Learning technique known as Convolutional Denoising Autoencoder to denoise synthetic images of state-of-the-art radio telescopes, with the goal of detecting the faint, diffused radio sources predicted to characterize the radio cosmic web. In our application, denoising is intended to address both the reduction of random instrumental noise and the minimization of additional spurious artefacts like the sidelobes, resulting from the aperture synthesis technique. The effectiveness and the accuracy of the method are analysed for different kinds of corrupted input images, together with its computational perfoance. Specific attention has been devoted to create realistic mock observations for the training, exploiting the outcomes of cosmological numerical silations, to generate images corresponding to LOFAR HBA 8 h observations at 150 MHz. Our autoencoder can effectively denoise complex images identifying and extracting faint objects at the limits of the instrumental sensitivity. The method can efficiently scale on large data sets, exploiting high-perfoance computing solutions, in a fully automated way (i.e. no human supervision is required after training). It can accurately perfo image segmentation, identifying low brightness outskirts of diffused sources, proving to be a viable solution for detecting challenging extended objects hidden in noisy radio observations
Shock waves in the magnetized cosmic web: the role of obliquity and cosmic ray acceleration
Full text linkStructure formation shocks are believed to be the largest accelerators of cosmic rays in the Universe. However, little is still known about their efficiency in accelerating relativistic electrons and protons as a function of their magnetization properties, i.e. of their magnetic field strength and topology. In this work, we analyzed both uniform and adaptive mesh resolution simulations of large-scale structures with the magnetohydrodynamical grid code Enzo, studying the dependence of shock obliquity with different realistic scenarios of cosmic magnetism. We found that shock obliquities are more often perpendicular than what would be expected from a random three-dimensional distribution of vectors, and that this effect is particularly prominent in the proximity of filaments, due to the action of local shear motions. By coupling these results to recent works from particle-in-cell simulations, we estimated the flux of cosmic-ray protons in galaxy clusters, and showed that in principle the riddle of the missed detection of hadronic γ-ray emission by the Fermi-LAT can be explained if only quasi-parallel shocks accelerate protons. On the other hand, for most of the cosmic web the acceleration of cosmic-ray electrons is still allowed, due to the abundance of quasi-perpendicular shocks. We discuss quantitative differences between the analyzed models of magnetization of cosmic structures, which become more significant at low cosmic overdensities
Turbulence in the Intracluster Medium
Full text linkWe review our knowledge about turbulence in the intracluster medium, a very hot, dilute plasma that permeates clusters of galaxies. A thorough understanding of turbulence in the intracluster medium is crucial for the use of clusters to determine cosmological parameters. Moreover, clusters provide a unique laboratory to study a very unique and extreme plasma. Both, the observational evidence as well as results from (magneto-)hydrodynamical simulations are reviewed. In particular, we assess the roles of various drivers of turbulence: accretion and merging, active galactic nuclei, the motion of galaxies and conductive instabilities. It has been shown that the turbulence driven by accretion in galaxy clusters is mostly tangential in the inner regions and isotropic in regions close to the virial radius, while AGN drive mostly radial turbulent motions at close to sonic speeds. On the cluster scale, the energetically dominant mechanism for driving turbulence are major cluster mergers. In this chapter, we will focus on turbulent motions on the large scales—the properties of microphysical turbulence are reviewed elsewhere in this book (see the chapter by Brunetti and Jones)
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