The Impact of Baryons on the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe

TL;DR

This paper reviews how baryonic processes in hydro-dynamical simulations affect the large-scale structure of the universe, comparing results with dark-matter-only models across various statistical measures.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of baryonic effects on large-scale structure statistics using different simulation methods and models.

Findings

Baryons significantly alter the power spectrum and correlation functions.

Different baryon models lead to varying impacts on structure formation.

Hydro-dynamical simulations reveal more realistic galaxy formations.

Abstract

Numerical simulations play an important role in current astronomy researches. Previous dark-matter-only simulations have represented the large-scale structure of the Universe. However, nowadays, hydro-dynamical simulations with baryonic models, which can directly present realistic galaxies, may twist these results from dark-matter-only simulations. In this chapter, we mainly focus on these three statistical methods: power spectrum, two-point correlation function and halo mass function, which are normally used to characterize the large-scale structure of the Universe. We review how these baryon processes influence the cosmology structures from very large scale to quasi-linear and non-linear scales by comparing dark-matter-only simulations with their hydro-dynamical counterparts. At last, we make a brief discussion on the impacts coming from different baryon models and simulation codes.