The formation of voids in a universe with cold dark matter and a cosmological constant

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A spherical Lagrangian hydrodynamical code has been written to study the formation of cosmological structures in the early Universe. In this code we take into account the presence of collisionless non-baryonic cold dark matter (CDM), the cosmological constant and a series of physical processes present during and after the recombination era, such as photon drag resulting from the cosmic background radiation and hydrogen molecular production. We follow the evolution of the structure since the recombination era until the present epoch. As an application of this code we study the formation of voids starting from negative density perturbations which evolved during and after the recombination era. We analyse a set of COBE-normalized models, using different spectra to see their influence on the formation of voids. Our results show that large voids with diameters ranging from 10 h−1 Mpc up to 50 h−1 Mpc can be formed in a universe model dominated by the cosmological constant (ΩΛ∼0.8). This particular scenario is capable of forming large and deep empty regions (with density contrasts δ¯<−0.6). Our results also show that the physical processes acting on the baryonic matter produce a transition region where the radius of the dark matter component is greater than the baryonic void radius. The thickness of this transition region ranges from about tens of kiloparsecs up to a few megaparsecs, depending on the spectrum considered. Putative objects formed near voids and within the transition region would have a different amount of baryonic/dark matter when compared with Ωb/Ωd. If one were to use these galaxies to determine, by dynamical effects or other techniques, the quantity of dark matter present in the Universe, the result obtained would be only local and not representative of the Universe as a whole.