Speaker
Christine Jones
Description
The formation and evolution of large scale structures is a
central issue for cosmology. Located at nodes of the cosmic
web, clusters of galaxies are the largest collapsed
structures in the Universe with over 80% of their mass in
the form of dark matter. With hot gas comprising the bulk of
the baryonic mattter, in clusters we observe the
interactions between the hot and cold baryonic matter and
the dark matter. One of the major advances in our
understanding of large scale structures from the X-ray
images was that clusters were not relaxed systems, but are
often scarred by shock fronts and contact discontinuities
("cold fronts") produced by an ongoing merger or "near miss"
of a subcluster. The collisions of galaxy clusters are
unique experiments that allow us to study the properties of
normal and dark matter that are inaccessible by other means.
This presentation reviews our current understanding of the
growth of clusters through mergers, including recent studies
of the merging clusters A115 and RXJ1347, examples of Planck
SZ selected clusters and propects for future cluster surveys
from the eRosita mission.
