The Matryoshka Run: A Eulerian Refinement Strategy to Study the Statistics of Turbulence in Virialized Cosmic Structures
Abstract
We study the statistical properties of turbulence driven by structure formation in a massive merging galaxy cluster at redshift z = 0. The development of turbulence is ensured as the largest eddy turnover time is much shorter than the Hubble time independent of mass and redshift. We achieve a large dynamic range of spatial scales through a novel Eulerian refinement strategy where the cluster volume is refined with progressively finer uniform nested grids during gravitational collapse. This provides an unprecedented resolution of 7.3 h -1 kpc across the virial volume. The probability density functions of various velocity-derived quantities exhibit the features characteristic of fully developed compressible turbulence observed in dedicated periodic-box simulations. Shocks generate only 60% of the total vorticity within the R vir/3 region and 40% beyond that. We compute second- and third-order longitudinal and transverse structure functions for both solenoidal and compressional components in the cluster core, virial region, and beyond. The structure functions exhibit a well-defined inertial range of turbulent cascade. The injection scale is comparable to the virial radius but increases toward the outskirts. Within R vir/3, the spectral slope of the solenoidal component is close to Kolmogorov's, but for the compressional component is substantially steeper and close to Burgers's; the flow is mostly solenoidal and statistically rigorously, which is consistent with fully developed homogeneous and isotropic turbulence. Small-scale anisotropy appears due to numerical artifact. Toward the virial region, the flow becomes increasingly compressional, the structure functions become flatter, and modest genuine anisotropy appear particularly close to the injection scale. In comparison, mesh adaptivity based on Lagrangian refinement and the same finest resolution leads to a lack of turbulent power on a small scales, an excess thereof on large scales, and unreliable density-weighted structure functions.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- February 2014
- DOI:
- 10.1088/0004-637X/782/1/21
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1310.2951
- Bibcode:
- 2014ApJ...782...21M
- Keywords:
-
- galaxies: clusters: general;
- hydrodynamics;
- large-scale structure of universe;
- methods: numerical;
- turbulence;
- Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 20 pages, 17 figures, accepted to ApJ. 5 new pages and 6 new figures. Expanded discussion on vorticity generation, which is found to be only partially generated by shocks. Direct comparison with Lagrangian AMR and new section on numerical convergence of the results. Full resolution images (recommended) available at http://www.exp-astro.phys.ethz.ch/miniati/turbulence.pdf