X-ray Clusters
The most massive collapsed structures in the universe
Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe, filled with hot plasma that shines in X-rays and scatters the cosmic microwave background. Simulations of cluster formation connect their observable properties — X-ray luminosity, temperature, and Sunyaev–Zel’dovich signal — to the underlying cosmology, building on the scaling relations and virial conventions established in early work (Bryan & Norman, 1998).
Current research focuses on the physics that shapes cluster cores: how AGN jets heat the intracluster medium and quench star formation in massive ellipticals (Su et al., 2024; Weinberger et al., 2023), and what high-resolution observations of filamentary nebulae around central galaxies like NGC 1275 reveal about the multiphase gas there (Vigneron et al., 2024). New simulation campaigns make targeted, zoomed resimulations of massive halos practical at scale (Lee et al., 2024).
Within Learning the Universe, we are now running constrained simulations of real objects — reproducing the Coma cluster from its observed large-scale environment and testing the predictions against X-ray and Compton-y data (Steinwandel et al., 2026).