Unleashing Structure Formation in modern Super Computers

 

Merging galaxy clusters are among the most energetic events in our Universe. The cosmic collision releases vast amounts of gravitational energy into the ionized plasma  that is trapped in the cluster center. The interaction heats this atmosphere and drives giant shock waves and turbulence through the medium. These extreme motions act like a dynamo, amplifying the magnetic field and accelerating particles to nearly the speed of light. This is observable with modern radio telescopes.

Recently, radio interferometers have been improved dramatically, spearheaded by the pan-European LOFAR observatory. This development is revolutionizing the field with new discoveries being reported nearly every month. At the unexplored low radio frequencies below 300 MHz, LOFAR reveals mysterious diffuse radio sources in clusters. Due to the complexity of the underlying physics, the interpretation of the observations remains challenging. Numerical simulations of cosmic structure formation including turbulence, magnetic fields and cosmic-rays are key to understand this complex dynamics in clusters, filaments and large scale stucture.

We are building are novel numerical approach to this problem combining highly accurate methods for gravity and magnetized fluids with cutting edge techniques in high performance computing …

 
 
 

Read our blog on non-thermal cluster astrophysics, high performance computing and WOMBAT code development.

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THE PROJECT

Dive into the science and explore our groundbreaking numerical approach to solve a challenging problem.

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The Code

Learn about our code WOMBAT and the bleeding-edge technologies in high performance computing.

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The Results

Explore our recent publications and learn about our open science policy.

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THE TEAM

Meet the people developing WOMBAT. We are an international collaboration of academic and industry partners spanning 3 continents.

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