• DOI:10.1038/nature03597
• Corpus ID: 4383030

Simulations of the formation, evolution and clustering of galaxies and quasars

@article{Springel2005SimulationsOT,
  title={Simulations of the formation, evolution and clustering of galaxies and quasars},
  author={Volker Springel and Simon D. M. White and Adrian Jenkins and Carlos S. Frenk and Naoki Yoshida and Liang Gao and Julio F. Navarro and Robert J. Thacker and Darren J. Croton and John C. Helly and John A Peacock and Shaun Cole and Peter A Thomas and Hugh M. P. Couchman and August E. Evrard and J. M. Colberg and Frazer R. Pearce},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2005},
  volume={435},
  pages={629-636}
}

• V. Springel, S. White, +14 authors F. Pearce
• Published 2 June 2005
• Physics
• Nature

The cold dark matter model has become the leading theoretical picture for the formation of structure in the Universe. This model, together with the theory of cosmic inflation, makes a clear prediction for the initial conditions for structure formation and predicts that structures grow hierarchically through gravitational instability. Testing this model requires that the precise measurements delivered by galaxy surveys can be compared to robust and equally precise theoretical calculations. Here we present a simulation of the growth of dark matter structure using 2,1603 particles, following them from redshift z = 127 to the present in a cube-shaped region 2.230 billion lightyears on a side. In postprocessing, we also follow the formation and evolution of the galaxies and quasars. We show that baryon-induced features in the initial conditions of the Universe are reflected in distorted form in the low-redshift galaxy distribution, an effect that can be used to constrain the nature of dark energy with future generations of observational surveys of galaxies.