"Simulating the large-scale baryonic Universe"

© Yohan Dubois

Left panels: large-scale views of the simulated Horizon-AGN Universe with ~100 Mpc size on top left and ~10 Mpc size on bottom left. Blue/green colors code the gas density with thin extended filaments and bright spots highlights the neutral gas content in galaxies. At the nodes of the cosmic web delimited by filaments of matter, gas is heated by infalling cosmic gas that turns its kinetic energy into internal energy (=heat), in addition to galaxies releasing tremendous amounts of energy through feedback from supernovae and supermassive black holes.

The series of panels on the right side of the figure depicts a high-mass cluster successively zoomed-in with (from top to bottom) dark matter density, gas density, gas temperature, gas metallicity, and stellar density. In these highly clustered regions the brightest central galaxy (BCG) is surrounded by multiple satellite galaxies that will end up merging with the central structure, which tend to randomize stellar orbits and turn the BCG into a so-called elliptical galaxy.