Old research pages

I'm keeping these old research pages here for the benefit of anyone who might arrive here from an external page. They are no longer updated. Please visit my new web site at http://sipapu.astro.illinois.edu/~ricker/. Eventually some content from these pages will migrate to the new site.

Mergers between Clusters of Galaxies

This page organizes access to images and movies from various cluster merger simulations I have performed. You are welcome to use them in talks, etc., so long as you credit them properly. See this page for more information on clusters.

Movies are in MPEG or Quicktime format unless otherwise indicated.

Offset mergers with gas and dark matter

Ricker, P. M. and Sarazin, C. L. Ap. J. 561 621 (2001)
Ricker, P. M. and Sarazin, C. L. BAAS 194 (1999)

These calculations are a parameter study of offset collisions between clusters dominated by dark matter with an NFW density profile. Mass ratios of 1:1 and 1:3 and impact parameters of 0, 2, and 5 times the NFW scale radius were studied. The scale radius was twice the gas core radius. The simulations were performed using COSMOS. Click on the images in the table below to see the images and movies available for each run.

Impact parameter

Mass
ratio

	zero	2r_s	5r_s
1:1
1:3

Offset mergers with gas only

Ricker, P. M. Ap. J. 496 670 (1998)

These calculations are a parameter study of clusters containing only a collisional component (gas) with equal masses and impact parameters of 0, 5, and 10 times the gas core radius. They were performed using PPMnD, a parallel self-gravitating PPM code I wrote for my PhD work. PPMnD later became the hydro and gravity components of COSMOS. The movies show gas variables in the collision plane.

Mass
ratio

Impact
parameter

Available images and movies

1:1

zero