The Eventful Life of Galaxy Clusters: from Violent Proto-Clusters to Present-day Monsters

Galaxy Clusters at present day are the most massive nodes of the cosmic web, and hosts to thousands of individual galaxies as well as massive hot gas halos that shine brightly in the X-ray. They strongly influence and shape the properties of the galaxies they host, including large fractions of quiescent non-star-forming galaxies, and they are even used as cosmological probes. At higher redshifts, the properties of the most massive observed structures change in time, being dominated by massive star-bursting galaxies at redshifts of z=4 or higher. Connecting the different stages of galaxy clusters from the protocluster core stages to the most massive galaxy clusters observed today reveals that galaxy clusters can have very different evolutional pathways: some have formed their cores already at redshifts of z=4 an higher, but some of the most massive nodes have assembled to achieve cluster masses only recently below a redshift of z=1. In this talk I review our current understanding on galaxy cluster evolution through cosmic time, combining knowledge from both observations and simulations.