Sensitivity of non-radiative cloud-wind interactions to the hydrodynamics solver

Understand

Cloud-wind interactions are common in the interstellar and circumgalactic media.

• Many studies have used simulations of such interactions to investigate the effect of particular physical processes, but the impact of the choice of hydrodynamics solver has largely been overlooked.
• Here we study the cloud-wind interaction, also known as the "blob test", using seven different hydrodynamics solvers: Three flavours of SPH, a moving mesh, adaptive mesh refinement and two meshless schemes.
• The evolution of masses in dense gas and intermediate-temperature gas, as well as the covering fraction of intermediate-temperature gas, are systematically compared for initial density contrasts of 10 and 100, and five numerical resolutions.