Shock finding on a moving-mesh: I. Shock statistics in non-radiative cosmological simulations

Understand

Cosmological shock waves play an important role in hierarchical structure formation by dissipating and thermalizing kinetic energy of gas flows, thereby heating the universe.

• Furthermore, identifying shocks in hydrodynamical simulations and measuring their Mach number accurately is critical for calculating the production of non-thermal particle components through diffusive shock acceleration.
• However, shocks are often significantly broadened in numerical simulations, making it challenging to implement an accurate shock finder.
• We here introduce a refined methodology for detecting shocks in the moving-mesh code AREPO, and show that results for shock statistics can be sensitive to implementation details.