We explore the possibility of detecting radio emission in the \emph{cosmic web} by analyzing shock waves in the MareNostrum cosmological simulation. This requires a careful calibration of shock finding algorithms in Smoothed-Particle Hydrodynamics simulations, which we present here. Moreover, we identify the elements of the cosmic web, namely voids, walls, filaments and clusters with the use of the SpineWeb technique, a procedure that classifies the structure in terms of its topology. Thus, we are able to study the Mach number distribution as a function of its environment. We find that the median Mach number, for clusters is Mclusters≈1.8, for filaments is Mfilaments≈6.2, for walls is Mwalls≈7.5, and for voids is Mvoids≈18. We then estimate the radio emission in the cosmic web using the formalism derived in Hoeft & Br\"{u}ggen (2007). We also find that in order to match our simulations with observational data (e.g., NVSS radio relic luminosity function), a fraction of energy dissipated at the shock of ξe=0.0005 is needed, in contrast with the ξe=0.005 proposed by Hoeft et al. (2008). We find that 41% of clusters with M≥1014M⊙ host diffuse radio emission in the form of radio relics. Moreover, we predict that the radio flux from filaments should be S150MHz∼0.12μJy at a frequency of 150 MHz.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1204.1759,
title = {Radio Emission in the Cosmic Web},
author = {Pablo A. Araya-Melo and Miguel A. Aragon-Calvo and Marcus Brueggen and Matthias Hoeft},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.1759},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
19 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS. Minor changes to tex file