The Nature of the Warm/Hot Intergalactic Medium I. Numerical Methods, Convergence, and OVI Absorption

Understand

We perform a series of cosmological simulations using Enzo, an Eulerian adaptive-mesh refinement, N-body + hydrodynamical code, applied to study the warm/hot intergalactic medium.

• The WHIM may be an important component of the baryons missing observationally at low redshift.
• We investigate the dependence of the global star formation rate and mass fraction in various baryonic phases on spatial resolution and methods of incorporating stellar feedback.
• Although both resolution and feedback significantly affect the total mass in the WHIM, all of our simulations find that the WHIM fraction peaks at z ~ 0.5, declining to 35-40% at z = 0.