A volume rendering of the three-dimensional temperature structure around a single halo at z = 2. Uses an orthographic projection with depth and height equal to 5.5 rvir (~620 kpc). The colortable and 4-gaussian transfer function are shown. A front-to-back ray tracing method is used, with no scattering and no absorption. Along each ray we sample with a constant step-size of 0.25 kpc. The temperature at each sample point is calculated using the standard cubic-spline SPH kernel interpolant with adaptive smoothing length h over the N = 200 nearest neighbours (the representation of the gas in terms of a Voronoi tessellation is not used). We choose this rather large smoothing scale to focus on the large scale temperature structure of the halo, at the expense of visualizing very small scale features. The white dot marks the halo centre, and the white circles denote one and two times the virial radius.

Methods: ArepoVTK code