Cosmological Shocks in Eulerian Simulations: Main Properties and Cosmic Rays Acceleration

Abstract

Aims: morpholgies, number and energy distributions of Cosmological Shock Waves from a set of ENZO cosmological simulations are produced, along with a study of the connection with Cosmic Rays processes in different environments. Method: we perform cosmological simulations with the public release of the PPM code ENZO, adopt a simple and physically motivated numerical setup to follow the evolution of cosmic structures at the resolution of 125kpc per cell, and characterise shocks with a new post processing scheme. Results: we estimate the efficency of the acceleration of Cosmic Ray particles and present the first comparison of our results with existing limits from observations of galaxy clusters.

7 pages, 5 color figures, to appear in Proceedings of the workshop "Computational Astrophysics in Italy: results and perspectives", Rome - March 12, 2008, Memorie della SAIt Supplementi