Gamma-ray bursts from stellar remnants: probing the Universe at high redshift

A gamma-ray burst (GRB) releases an amount of energy similar to that of a supernova explosion, which combined with its rapid variability suggests an origin related to neutron stars or black holes. Since these compact stellar remnants form from the most massive stars not long after their birth, GRBs should trace the star formation rate in the Universe; we show that the GRB flux distribution is consistent with this. Because of the strong evolution of the star formation rate with redshift, it follows that the dimmest known bursts have z  ∼ 6, much above the value usually quoted and beyond the most distant quasars. This explains the absence of bright galaxies in well-studied GRB error boxes. The increased distances imply a peak luminosity of 8.3 × 10⁵¹ erg s⁻¹ and a rate density of 0.025 per million years per galaxy. These values are 20 times higher and 150 times lower, respectively, than are implied by fits with non-evolving GRB rates. This means either that GRBs are caused by a much rarer phenomenon than mergers of binary neutron stars, or that their gamma-ray emission is often invisible to us due to beaming. Precise burst locations from optical transients will discriminate between the various models for GRBs from stellar deaths, because the distance between progenitor birth place and burst varies greatly among them. The dimmest GRBs are then the most distant known objects, and may probe the Universe at an age when the first stars were forming.     

Clustering of galaxies at high redshifts

Recent observations show a large concentration of galaxies at high redshift. At first sight, strong clustering of galaxies at high redshifts seems to be in contradiction with the models of structure formation. In this paper we show that such structures are a manifestation of the strong clustering of rare peaks in the density field. We compute the frequency of occurrence of such large concentrations of galaxies in some models of structure formation.     

TreePM: A code for cosmological N-body simulations

We describe the TreePM method for carrying out large N-Body simulations to study formation and evolution of the large scale structure in the Universe. This method is a combination of Barnes and Hut tree code and Particle-Mesh code. It combines the automatic inclusion of periodic boundary conditions of PM simulations with the high resolution of tree codes. This is done by splitting the gravitational force into a short range and a long range component. We describe the splitting of force between these two parts. We outline the key differences between TreePM and some other N-Body methods.     

A comparison of simulated and analytic major merger counts

We use large volume, high resolution, N -body simulations of three different ΛCDM models, with different clustering strengths, to generate dark-matter halo merging histories. Over the reliable range of halo masses, roughly galaxy groups to rich clusters of galaxies, we quantify the number density of major mergers for two different time intervals and compare them with analytic predictions based on the extended Press–Schechter theory.     

Evolution of galaxy clustering

We study the evolution of the correlation function of dark matter haloes in the CDM class of models. We show that the halo correlation function does not evolve in proportion with the correlation function of the underlying mass distribution. The earliest haloes to collapse, which correspond to rare peaks in the density field, cluster very strongly. The amplitude of the halo correlation function decreases from its initial, large, value. This decrease continues until the average peaks have collapsed, after which the amplitude grows slowly. This behaviour is shown to be generic and the epoch of minimum amplitude depends only on the rms  fluctuations in mass at the relevant scale and, to a much smaller extent, on the slope of the power spectrum at that scale. We discuss the relevance of this result for interpretation of observations of galaxy and quasar clustering.     

Gravitational collapse in an expanding background and the role of substructure – II. Excess power at small scales and its effect on collapse of structures at larger scales

We study the interplay of clumping at small scales with the collapse and relaxation of perturbations at larger scales using N -body simulations. We quantify the effect of collapsed haloes on perturbations at larger scales using the two-point correlation function, moments of counts in cells and the mass function. The purpose of the study is twofold and the primary aim is to quantify the role played by collapsed low-mass haloes in the evolution of perturbations at large scales; this is in view of the strong effect seen when the large scale perturbation is highly symmetric. Another reason for this study is to ask whether features or a cut-off in the initial power spectrum can be detected using measures of clustering at scales that are already non-linear. The final aim is to understand the effect of ignoring perturbations at scales smaller than the resolution of N -body simulations. We find that these effects are ignorable if the scale of non-linearity is larger than the average interparticle separation in simulations. Features in the initial power spectrum can be detected easily if the scale of these features is in the linear regime; detecting such features becomes difficult as the relevant scales become non-linear. We find no effect of features in initial power spectra at small scales on the evolved power spectra at large scales. We may conclude that, in general, the effect on the evolution of perturbations at large scales of clumping on small scales is very small and may be ignored in most situations.