Baryonic Effects on Cosmic Structure Formation
Summary
The formation of cosmic structures is traditionally modelled through the gravitational collapse of dark matter, yet baryonic components—ordinary matter in the form of gas, stars and dust—exert a profound influence on the growth and distribution of these structures. Processes such as radiative cooling, heating by supernova explosions and feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) redistribute baryons within and around dark matter haloes, modifying key statistical measures of structure such as the matter power spectrum and the halo mass function. Radiative cooling drives gas to collapse and form stars, while galactic winds and jets can expel gas from halo centres, suppressing star formation and altering the density profiles of both baryons and dark matter. At scales below a few megaparsecs, these baryonic processes lead to a suppression of clustering power of up to twenty per cent compared to dark‐matter‐only predictions. Understanding these effects is essential for interpreting observations of weak gravitational lensing, X-ray emission and Sunyaev–Zeldovich signatures, and for deriving unbiased cosmological parameters from large surveys.
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Baryonic Effects on Cosmic Structure Formation publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in baryonic effects on cosmic structure formation across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Baryonic feedback: Energy and momentum injection into gas by supernovae and AGN, driving outflows and altering halo gas content.
Matter power spectrum: A function describing the distribution of matter density fluctuations as a function of spatial scale.
Cosmic shear: Weak gravitational lensing effect caused by large-scale structure, observed as coherent distortions in galaxy shapes.
Halo mass function: The number density of dark matter haloes per unit mass interval, as a function of halo mass.
Polytropic index: An exponent in the relation between gas pressure and density, characterising its thermodynamic state.
References
- X-Ray–Cosmic-Shear Cross-Correlations: First Detection and Constraints on Baryonic Effects. Physical Review Letters (2024).
- DES Y3 cosmic shear down to small scales: Constraints on cosmology and baryons. Astronomy & Astrophysics (2023).
- The FLAMINGO project: cosmological hydrodynamical simulations for large-scale structure and galaxy cluster surveys. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2023).
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