ASTROPHYSICS

The neighbourhood in the immediate vicinity of the Milky Way is known as the “Local Group”. It is a binary system composed of two averaged sized galaxies (the Milky Way and Andromeda) dominating a volume that is roughly ~7 Mpc in diameter. At a distance of around 15Mpc, the Virgo cluster comes into view as the main defining feature of our neighbourhood on these scales. Beyond Virgo, a number of well known and well observed clusters like Centaurus, Fornax, Hydra, Norma, Perseus and Coma dominate the night sky. This is our cosmic neighbourhood. The goal of this project is, for the first time, to perform targeted, state of the art hydro-dynamical simulations covering this special region of the universe and to compare the results with various…

The outcome of a large set of cosmological, hydro-dynamical simulations from the project Magneticum now became made available to the general community through operating a cosmological simulation web portal. Users are able to access data products extracted from the simulations via a user-friendly web interface, browsing through visualizations of cosmological structures while guided by meta data queries helping to select galaxy clusters and galaxy groups of interest. Several services are available for the users: (I) ClusterInspect; (II) SimCut (raw data access); (III) Smac (2D maps); (IV) Phox (virtual X-ray observations, taking the specifications of various, existing and future X-ray telescopes into account.