The CLUES project: Constrained Local UniversE Simulations

Abstract

Constrained simulations of the Local Universe are an invaluable tool to investigate many aspects of dark halo and galaxy formation in environments that look pretty much like the the one our Milky Way resides. In this way, we can minimize the effect of cosmic variance when comparing the results of numerical simulations with observations of the Local Volume (LV, a sphere of 7–8 Mpc around us). In this paper we present the CLUES Project, an international collaboration whose main goal is to produce realistic cosmological simulations of the Local Universe, by imposing observational constrains on the mass and velocity fields of the initial random gaussian fluctuation realizations. The advantage of this technique is that we reproduce the large scale structures regardless whether we change the cosmological model, or the nature of dark matter candidates. In this regard, we can then make reliable comparisons between simulation outputs and draw conclusions that are less affected by cosmic variance.