@article{MizunoPohlNiemiecetal.2011, author = {Mizuno, Yosuke and Pohl, Martin and Niemiec, Jacek and Zhang, Bing and Nishikawa, Ken-Ichi and Hardee, Philip E.}, title = {Magnetic-field amplification by turbulence in a relativistic shockpropagating through an inhomogeneous medium}, series = {The astrophysical journal : an international review of spectroscopy and astronomical physics}, volume = {726}, journal = {The astrophysical journal : an international review of spectroscopy and astronomical physics}, number = {2}, publisher = {IOP Publ. Ltd.}, address = {Bristol}, issn = {0004-637X}, doi = {10.1088/0004-637X/726/2/62}, pages = {11}, year = {2011}, abstract = {We perform two-dimensional relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of a mildly relativistic shock propagating through an inhomogeneous medium. We show that the postshock region becomes turbulent owing to preshock density inhomogeneity, and the magnetic field is strongly amplified due to the stretching and folding of field lines in the turbulent velocity field. The amplified magnetic field evolves into a filamentary structure in two-dimensional simulations. The magnetic energy spectrum is flatter than the Kolmogorov spectrum and indicates that a so-called small-scale dynamo is occurring in the postshock region. We also find that the amount of magnetic-field amplification depends on the direction of the mean preshock magnetic field, and the timescale of magnetic-field growth depends on the shock strength.}, language = {en} } @article{TepperGarciaRichterSchayeetal.2011, author = {Tepper-Garcia, Thorsten and Richter, Philipp and Schaye, Joop and Booth, C. M. and Vecchia, Claudio Dalla and Theuns, Tom and Wiersma, Robert P. C.}, title = {Absorption signatures of warm-hot gas at low redshift o vi}, series = {Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society}, volume = {413}, journal = {Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society}, number = {1}, publisher = {Wiley-Blackwell}, address = {Hoboken}, issn = {0035-8711}, doi = {10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.18123.x}, pages = {190 -- 212}, year = {2011}, abstract = {We investigate the origin and physical properties of O vi absorbers at low redshift (z = 0.25) using a subset of cosmological, hydrodynamical simulations from the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations (OWLS) project. Intervening O vi absorbers are believed to trace shock-heated gas in the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) and may thus play a key role in the search for the missing baryons in the present-day Universe. When compared to observations, the predicted distributions of the different O vi line parameters (column density, Doppler parameter, rest equivalent width W-r) from our simulations exhibit a lack of strong O vi absorbers, a discrepancy that has also been found by Oppenheimer \& Dave. This suggests that physical processes on subgrid scales (e.g. turbulence) may strongly influence the observed properties of O vi systems. We find that the intervening O vi absorption arises mainly in highly metal enriched (10-1 < Z/Z(circle dot) less than or similar to 1) gas at typical overdensities of 1 < /<<>> less than or similar to 102. One-third of the O vi absorbers in our simulation are found to trace gas at temperatures T < 105 K, while the rest arises in gas at higher temperatures, most of them around T = 105.3 +/- 0.5 K. These temperatures are much higher than inferred by Oppenheimer \& Dave, probably because that work did not take the suppression of metal-line cooling by the photoionizing background radiation into account. While the O vi resides in a similar region of (, T)-space as much of the shock-heated baryonic matter, the vast majority of this gas has a lower metal content and does not give rise to detectable O vi absorption. As a consequence of the patchy metal distribution, O vi absorbers in our simulations trace only a very small fraction of the cosmic baryons (< 2 per cent) and the cosmic metals. Instead, these systems presumably trace previously shock-heated, metal-rich material from galactic winds that is now mixing with the ambient gas and cooling. The common approach of comparing O vi and H i column densities to estimate the physical conditions in intervening absorbers from QSO observations may be misleading, as most of the H i (and most of the gas mass) is not physically connected with the high-metallicity patches that give rise to the O vi absorption.}, language = {en} }