Schedule Mar 18, 2011
Observing Simulated Clusters: A Novel Virtual X-ray Observatory
Veronica Biffi (MPI Garching)

X-ray observations continue to provide us with an increasingly detailed picture of galaxy clusters, for which a clear interpretation of the underlying physical processes is very challenging. While hydrodynamical simulations can currently address many of the questions about the dynamics of galaxy clusters, it is vital to find a faithful way to directly compare the output data from such simulations to X-ray observations. For this purpose, virtual observatories have been developed and devoted to obtain mock images from numerical simulations of galaxy clusters simulating observations with X-ray satellites (e.g. Chandra, XMM-Newton), which can be analysed with the same methods used for the real ones. I will present here a novel virtual X-ray observatory based on an original approach able to significantly gain in spectral resolution and computational cost with respect to previous implementations. This tool is devoted to produce X-ray photon emission from the gaseous component present in hydrodynamical simulations. We apply and test the code by simulating SUZAKU observations of a galaxy cluster extracted from a hydrodynamical simulation performed with the TreePM/SPH code GADGET-2.

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