  The behavior of an isolated dilute granular gas near the threshold of its
clustering instability is investigated by means of fluctuating hydrodynamics
and the direct simulation Monte Carlo method. The theoretical predictions from
the former are shown to be in good agreement with the simulation results. The
total energy of the the system is renormalized by the fluctuations of the
vorticity field. Moreover, the scaled second moment of the energy fluctuations
exhibits a power-law divergent behavior
