We study the formation and evolution of the cosmic web, using the high-resolution CosmoGrid $Lambda$CDM simulation. In particular, we investigate the evolution of the large-scale structure around void halo groups, and compare this to observations of
the VGS-31 galaxy group, which consists of three interacting galaxies inside a large void. The structure around such haloes shows a great deal of tenuous structure, with most of such systems being embedded in intra-void filaments and walls. We use the Nexus+ algorithm to detect walls and filaments in CosmoGrid, and find them to be present and detectable at every scale. The void regions embed tenuous walls, which in turn embed tenuous filaments. We hypothesize that the void galaxy group of VGS-31 formed in such an environment.
We present a method to couple N-body star cluster simulations to a cosmological tidal field, using the Astrophysical Multipurpose Software Environment. We apply this method to star clusters embedded in the CosmoGrid dark matter-only LambdaCDM simulat
ion. Our star clusters are born at z = 10 (corresponding to an age of the Universe of about 500 Myr) by selecting a dark matter particle and initializing a star cluster with 32,000 stars on its location. We then follow the dynamical evolution of the star cluster within the cosmological environment. We compare the evolution of star clusters in two Milky-Way size haloes with a different accretion history. The mass loss of the star clusters is continuous irrespective of the tidal history of the host halo, but major merger events tend to increase the rate of mass loss. From the selected two dark matter haloes, the halo that experienced the larger number of mergers tends to drive a smaller mass loss rate from the embedded star clusters, even though the final masses of both haloes are similar. We identify two families of star clusters: native clusters, which become part of the main halo before its final major merger event, and the immigrant clusters, which are accreted upon or after this event; native clusters tend to evaporate more quickly than immigrant clusters. Accounting for the evolution of the dark matter halo causes immigrant star clusters to retain more mass than when the z=0 tidal field is taken as a static potential. The reason for this is the weaker tidal field experienced by immigrant star clusters before merging with the larger dark matter halo.
We study the formation and evolution of filamentary configurations of dark matter haloes in voids. Our investigation uses the high-resolution LambdaCDM simulation CosmoGrid to look for void systems resembling the VGS_31 elongated system of three inte
racting galaxies that was recently discovered by the Void Galaxy Survey (VGS) inside a large void in the SDSS galaxy redshift survey. HI data revealed these galaxies to be embedded in a common elongated envelope, possibly embedded in intravoid filament. In the CosmoGrid simulation we look for systems similar to VGS_31 in mass, size and environment. We find a total of eight such systems. For these systems, we study the distribution of neighbour haloes, the assembly and evolution of the main haloes and the dynamical evolution of the haloes, as well as the evolution of the large-scale structure in which the systems are embedded. The spatial distribution of the haloes follows that of the dark matter environment. We find that VGS_31-like systems have a large variation in formation time, having formed between 10 Gyr ago and the present epoch. However, the environments in which the systems are embedded evolved resemble each other substantially. Each of the VGS_31-like systems is embedded in an intra-void wall, that no later than z = 0.5 became the only prominent feature in its environment. While part of the void walls retain a rather featureless character, we find that around half of them are marked by a pronounced and rapidly evolving substructure. Five haloes find themselves in a tenuous filament of a few Mpc/h long inside the intra-void wall. Finally, we compare the results to observed data from VGS_31. Our study implies that the VGS_31 galaxies formed in the same (proto)filament, and did not meet just recently. The diversity amongst the simulated halo systems indicates that VGS_31 may not be typical for groups of galaxies in voids.
We present the results of the Cosmogrid cosmological N-body simulation suites based on the concordance LCDM model. The Cosmogrid simulation was performed in a 30Mpc box with 2048^3 particles. The mass of each particle is 1.28x10^5 Msun, which is suff
icient to resolve ultra-faint dwarfs. We found that the halo mass function shows good agreement with the Sheth & Tormen fitting function down to ~10^7 Msun. We have analyzed the spherically averaged density profiles of the three most massive halos which are of galaxy group size and contain at least 170 million particles. The slopes of these density profiles become shallower than -1 at the inner most radius. We also find a clear correlation of halo concentration with mass. The mass dependence of the concentration parameter cannot be expressed by a single power law, however a simple model based on the Press-Schechter theory proposed by Navarro et al. gives reasonable agreement with this dependence. The spin parameter does not show a correlation with the halo mass. The probability distribution functions for both concentration and spin are well fitted by the log-normal distribution for halos with the masses larger than ~10^8 Msun. The subhalo abundance depends on the halo mass. Galaxy-sized halos have 50% more subhalos than ~10^{11} Msun halos have.
