Since the primary data products are FITS images and tables, you can use the standard tools that work with astronomical data in the FITS format, such as:
yt also has some support for analyzing and visualizing FITS image and X-ray event data.
This is because it actually is non-uniform. These simulations are run with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR), a technique for solving physics equations on a mesh which allows for different parts of the grid to be at higher resolution than others. In these simulations, the mesh is refined on sharp jumps in the density and temperature (e.g., shocks and cold fronts), as well as on regions of high density (e.g., the cores of clusters). In static mesh refinement (SMR) simulations, the refinement pattern is set from the beginning of the simulation and is static in time. More details on how the mesh refinement in these simulations works can be found in the original papers associated with the simulations or in any of the method papers associated with AMR/SMR codes (e.g., FLASH, Enzo, or Athena).
These are not “standard” X-ray events files. The main differences with normal events files are:
The idea is not to create an exact simulation, but one that approximates the statistical properties of what the source would look like while allowing one to use standard X-ray tools to analyze the spectral and spatial properties of the data. If you have any issues applying standard X-ray analysis to these files, submit a bug report.
Though the events have been simulated for a particular detector, Chandra’s ACIS-I, it seemed prudent to not include background events and instead let the end-user decide what background to simulate, if any. For example, one could use background events from the ACIS blank-sky background files.
This happens if the images are taking a while to load.
Mainly for lack of time, but also for lack of knowledge about the best way to go about it. If you have some ideas of other derived data products that may be useful, do not hesitate to hit up the mailing list.
If you have some galaxy cluster-related simulation data that fits within the goals of the catalog, please contact the mailing list and we can discuss getting it set up.
There are known issues with opening large ZIP files on macOS. See this Stack Exchange note for possible resolutions.
Watch this space for a future journal reference. For now, include this text in the acknowledgments:
“This work made use of data from the Galaxy Cluster Merger Catalog (http://gcmc.hub.yt).”
The data is made available under CC BY 4.0.
On each simulation set page there is an “Acknowledgments” section which details the computational resources used to perform the simulations. At this time, most of the simulations and the mock observations were produced using NASA’s Pleiades Supercomputer.
Please report any problems on our Github issues page.
If you have a question related to the catalog itself, contact the mailing list. If you have questions regarding yt, send mail to the yt-users list.