Resolving the Jeans mass in hydrodynamic simulations of hierarchical clustering

We examine the necessity of resolving the Jeans mass in hydrodynamical simulations of the hierarchical formation of cosmological structures. We consider a standard two-component fluid and use smoothed particle hydrodynamics to model the baryonic component. It is found that resolution of the Jeans mass is not necessary to extract bulk properties of bound objects that are independent of resolution, provided that the objects have undergone a …