The Missing Baryon Problem via Cosmological Zoom-in Simulations

TL;DR

This paper investigates the missing baryon problem using cosmological zoom-in simulations, analyzing the circumgalactic medium and synthetic quasar spectra to explore observational challenges and future research directions.

Contribution

It demonstrates the compatibility of the trident tool with ChaNGa simulation data and provides a proof-of-concept for analyzing the circumgalactic medium at high redshift.

Findings

Synthetic spectra show low flux, making absorption features hard to detect.

Trident is compatible with ChaNGa data format, enabling future analysis.

The study highlights observational challenges at high redshift.

Abstract

This thesis explores the missing baryon problem in a computational context. An overview of the problem is given, along with a discussion regarding the relevance of the Circumgalactic Medium (CMG) and cosmological Zoom-in simulations. The mechanisms underlying the N-body code ChaNGa (H. Menon, et al., Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology 2, 1 (2015), arXiv:1409.1929), as well as the data visualization and analysis tools yt (M. J. Turk, et al., 192, 9 (2011), arXiv:1011.3514) and trident (Hummels, et al., 847, 59 (2017), arXiv:1612.03935) are presented at a conceptual level. Finally, a series of synthetic quasar absorption spectra produced by using trident on a ChaNGa dataset from (S. Roca-Fabrega, et al., 917, 64 (2021), arXiv:2106.09738) at redshift of $z\sim4$ are shown. The low relative flux exhibited by these spectra render absorption features indistinguishable from background noise, and possible explanations for this phenomena such as high redshift are discussed. Though the resulting spectra exhibit serious obstacles for both qualitative and quantitative interpretation, they provide a "proof-of-concept" for future work, demonstrating trident's compatibility with ChaNGa's data format. Future prospects for using trident to analyze the CGM as simulated by ChaNGa are discussed, as well as possible extensions of this project.