Investigating the influence of magnetic fields upon structure formation with AMIGA - a C code for cosmological magnetohydrodynamics
Abstract
Despite greatly improved observational methods, the presence of magnetic fields at cosmological scales and their role in the process of large-scale structure formation still remain unclear. In this paper, we want to address the question how the presence of a hypothetical primordial magnetic field on large scales influences the cosmic structure formation in numerical simulations. As a tool for carrying out such simulations, we present our new numerical code AMIGA. It combines an N-body code with an Eulerian grid-based solver for the full set of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations in order to conduct simulations of dark matter, baryons and magnetic fields in a self-consistent way in a fully cosmological setting. Our numerical scheme includes effective methods to ensure proper capturing of shocks and highly supersonic flows and a divergence-free magnetic field. The high accuracy of the code is demonstrated by a number of numerical tests. We then present a series of cosmological MHD simulations and confirm that, in order to have a significant effect on the distribution of matter on large scales, the primordial magnetic field strength would have to be significantly higher than the current observational and theoretical constraints.
- Publication:
-
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Pub Date:
- March 2010
- DOI:
- 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.16144.x
- arXiv:
- arXiv:0912.1498
- Bibcode:
- 2010MNRAS.403..453D
- Keywords:
-
- MHD;
- methods: numerical;
- cosmology: theory;
- Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- accepted by MNRAS, 24 pages, 14 figures