A Hydrodynamic Simulation of Cluster Formation

We have developed a hybrid cosmological code to probe the baryonic gas dynamics of large cosmological structures. An adiabatic simulation of large scale structure formation has been performed, using initial conditions speci ed by the cold dark matter (CDM) power spectrum normalized to the COBE detection. A baryon fraction of 0:06 is adopted and the simulation follows an 85h 1 Mpc box with 25 million zones and 3 million particles. Analysis of the resulting data provides a powerful diagnostic of this particular model. The method shows promise in general by removing another layer of uncertainty between theory and observation. To demonstrate this, we compute an X-ray luminosity function that is straightforward to compare with observations. We also investigate some astrophysics of cluster formation.