Details about image

Courtesy of Tiziana Di Matteo.

Time evolution of a quasar host indentified at z=6.5, taken from a larger cosmological simulation of a Lambda cold dark matter universe. Shown are metallicity (left panel), projected metal density (center panel), and projected gas density (right panel), for slices of 100/h kpc width in the z-direction and and 250/h kpc in x and y. At z=6.5 the quasar has absolute magnitude mB=-26.2 and resides in a halo of mass 1.1 \times 10^{12} Solar Masses. The movie shows how the large scale movements of hosts through the evolving density field impact their metallicity and allows to study the relationship between the quasar phase and the first major star formation event.
See T. Di Matteo, R. Croft, V. Springel, L. Hernquist (2004, ApJ, submitted, astro-ph/0309533) for more details.