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

TL;DR

This paper analyzes cosmological shock waves in Eulerian simulations to understand their properties and role in cosmic ray acceleration, providing new insights into shock characteristics and their observational implications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel post-processing scheme to characterize shocks in cosmological simulations and compares cosmic ray acceleration efficiencies with observational data.

Findings

Shock properties are characterized across different environments.

Estimated cosmic ray acceleration efficiencies are consistent with observational limits.

First comparison of simulation results with galaxy cluster observations.

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.