Speaker
Description
Numerical simulations are the driving force behind much of the theoretical
progress in our understanding of the formation of structure in the
universe. Cosmological simulations must cover a large dynamical and mass
range. A representative volume of the universe should be large, but this
comes at the expense of the resolution. To overcome this problem we developed a new approach over the last two decades which consists of using observations of the nearby universe as constraints imposed on the initial conditions of the simulations.
The resulting constrained simulations successfully reproduce the observed
structure within a few tens of megaparsecs around the Milky Way including the
nearby well known clusters of galaxies. We have performed first constrained simulations within the CLUES project (Constrained Local UniversE simulations). More recently zoomed high resolution gasdynamical simulations allowed to study the formation of the Local Group in the right large scale environment, the HESTIA (High-resolution Environmental Simulations of The Immediate Area) project.
