The Virgo Consortium:The Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Clusters

Abstract

We report on work done by the Virgo consortium, an international collaboration set up in order to study the formation and evolution of Large-Scale Structure using N-body simulations on the latest generation of parallel supercomputers. We show results of 256³ particle simulations of the formation of clusters in four Dark Matter models with different cosmological parameters. Normalizing the models such that one obtains the correct abundance of rich clusters yields an interesting result: The peculiar velocities of the clusters are almost independent of г, and depend only weakly on Ω, the shape parameter of the power spectrum. Thus, it is nearly impossible to distinguish between high and low Ω models on the basis of the peculiar velocities.