Description of the infrastructure: 

The Astronomical Observatory of Trieste (OATs) is one of the laboratories of the INAF. INAF-OATs has a long experience in carrying out cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy clusters and in comparing the thermodynamical and chemodynamical properties of the simulated intra- cluster medium (ICM) with X-ray observations. The group has developed software packages to extract mock X-ray observations of galaxy clusters from numerical simulations. This expertise has been recently applied to generate mocks Athena X-IFU observations of simulated clusters, and mock WFI images to evaluate the instrument capabilities to extract entropy profiles of distant clusters and groups.

Offered services: 

The following services will be provided to visitors:

  • access to raw data of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy clusters;
  • training on the physical processes included in the simulation code (e.g. star formation, stellar evolution, chemical enrichment, feedback from SNe and AGN);
  • training on low-level postprocessing analysis products and software tools: users will become familiar with the procedures to extract intrinsic physical properties of the ICM, to be compared with results from X-ray observations; iv) access to mock X-ray event files generated by synthetic observations of simulated galaxy clusters: such event files can be generated by already developed X-ray simulators which account for the energy-dependent PSF and response functions for different X-ray telescopes.
Contact person(s): 
Stefano Borgani
Contact email(s):