English

Radio Emission in the Cosmic Web

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-06-04 v2

Abstract

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 Mclusters1.8\mathcal{M}_{\mathrm{clusters}}\approx1.8, for filaments is Mfilaments6.2\mathcal{M}_{\mathrm{filaments}}\approx 6.2, for walls is Mwalls7.5\mathcal{M}_{\mathrm{walls}}\approx 7.5, and for voids is Mvoids18\mathcal{M}_{\mathrm{voids}}\approx 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\xi_{\mathrm{e}}=0.0005 is needed, in contrast with the ξe=0.005\xi_{\mathrm{e}}=0.005 proposed by Hoeft et al. (2008). We find that 41% of clusters with M1014MM \ge 10^{14} M_{\odot} host diffuse radio emission in the form of radio relics. Moreover, we predict that the radio flux from filaments should be S150MHz0.12S_{150 MHz}\sim 0.12 μ\muJy 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

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:46:20.880Z