The Phoenix Project: the dark side of rich galaxy clusters

By Liang Gao, J. Navarro, Carlos S. Frenk, Adrian Jenkins, Volker Springel, Simon D. M. White. 2012

163 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce the Phoenix Project, a set of Λ cold dark matter (CDM) simulations of the dark matter component of nine rich galaxy clusters. Each cluster is simulated at least at two different numerical resolutions. For eight of them, the highest resolution corresponds to ∼130 million particles within the virial radius, while for one this number is over one billion. We study the structure and substructure of these systems and contrast them with six galaxy-sized dark matter haloes from the Aquarius Project, simulated at comparable resolution. This comparison highlights the approximate mass invariance of CDM halo structure and substructure. We find little difference in the spherically averaged mass, pseudo-phase-space density and velocity anisotropy profiles of Aquarius and Phoenix haloes. When scaled to the virial properties of the host halo, the abundance and radial distribution of subhaloes are also very similar, despite the fact that Aquarius and Phoenix haloes differ by roughly three decades in virial mass. The most notable difference is that cluster haloes have been assembled more recently and are thus significantly less relaxed than galaxy haloes, which leads to decreased regularity, increased halo-to-halo scatter and sizable deviations from the mean trends. This accentuates the effects of the strong asphericity of individual clusters on surface density profiles, which may vary by up to a factor of 3 at a given radius, depending on projection. The high apparent concentration reported for some strong-lensing clusters might very well reflect these effects. A more recent assembly also explains why substructure in some Phoenix haloes is slightly more abundant than in Aquarius, especially in the inner regions. Resolved subhaloes nevertheless contribute only 11 ± 3 per cent of the virial mass in Phoenix clusters. Together, the Phoenix and Aquarius simulation series provide a detailed and comprehensive prediction of the CDM distribution in galaxies and clusters when the effects of baryons can be neglected.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1186927dd38cb234c8954cbbbe853c925cbd16ad

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “…Trujillo-Gomez & Primack 2011) also of Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation 7 larger volumes (Angulo et al. 2012) or constrained to a certain halo mass scale (Diemand, Kuhlen & Madau 2007; Gao et al. 2012; Springel et al. 2008; Stadel et al. 2009) have made very important contributions.”
CLASH: WEAK-LENSING SHEAR-AND-MAGNIFICATION ANALYSIS OF 20 GALAXY CLUSTERS (2014, methodology): “As shown by high-resolution cluster simulations of Gao et al. (2012), the asphericity of clusters can lead to large variations of up to a factor of three in the projected density Σ(R) at a given radius R, depending on projection, especially within R ∼ 500 kpch−1 (see their Figure 9).”
THE DENSITY PROFILES OF MASSIVE, RELAXED GALAXY CLUSTERS. I. THE TOTAL DENSITY OVER THREE DECADES IN RADIUS (2012, methodology): “We considered additionally using Einasto models, which have been shown to provide more accurate representations of halos in numerical simulations (e.g., Merritt et al. 2006; Navarro et al. 2010; Gao et al. 2012).”
Halo and subhalo demographics with Planck cosmological parameters: Bolshoi–Planck and MultiDark–Planck simulations (2016, background): “…authors have shown that this is true for most of the scales (see e.g., Conroy, Wechsler & Kravtsov 2006; Reddick et al. 2013), others have argued that on the very small scales abundance matching fails in reproduce the observed clustering of galaxies (see e.g., Wang et al. 2007; Gao et al. 2012).”
THE DENSITY PROFILES OF MASSIVE, RELAXED GALAXY CLUSTERS. II. SEPARATING LUMINOUS AND DARK MATTER IN CLUSTER CORES (2012, methodology): “Figure 6 compares our measurements to highresolution CDM cluster simulations from the Phoenix project (Gao et al. 2012b), clearly demonstrating these DM-only simulations are a better match to the total density profile than that of the DM alone.”
Numerical simulations of the dark universe: State of the art and the next decade (2012, methodology): “Via Lactea II (1.5 million core-hours on Oak Ridge National Lab’s Jaguar), was the first simulation to use over a billion high resolution particles to resolve a single halo, Aquarius A-1 (3.5 million core-hours at the Leibniz Rechenzentrum in Garching, Germany) the first to have over a billion parti”
Inference of the cold dark matter substructure mass function at z = 0.2 using strong gravitational lenses (2014, methodology): “Using rescaled versions of the Aquarius (Springel et al. 2008) and Phoenix simulations (Gao et al. 2012), Xu et al. (2013) have explored the effect of mass substructure on the flux ratio of multiply imaged quasars in galaxies with masses, ellipticity and redshift comparable to the observed lens…”
DETECTION OF LENSING SUBSTRUCTURE USING ALMA OBSERVATIONS OF THE DUSTY GALAXY SDP.81 (2016, background): “…the radial distribution of subhalos is less centrally concentrated than the dark matter distribution of the host halo (i.e., csubs/chost < 1) (e.g., Nagai & Kravtsov 2005; Gao et al. 2012), and at small radii the subhalo distribution may become shallower than an NFW profile (e.g., Xu et al. 2015a).”
Sensitivity projections for dark matter searches with the Fermi large area telescope (2016, background): “For cluster-sized simulations, this mass resolution limit is ∼ 10(8)M [198, 199], as compared to the smallest subhalos, which may have masses as low as 10−6M [193–195], Estimates of the boost to the DM annihilation signal due to subhalos is thus dependent on extrapolations over several orders of mag”
LoCuSS: THE SLOW QUENCHING OF STAR FORMATION IN CLUSTER GALAXIES AND THE NEED FOR PRE-PROCESSING (2015, background): “In ΛCDM models structure formation occurs hierarchically, meaning that as the most massive collapsed structures in the universe, galaxy clusters form latest and are also the most dynamically immature (e.g., Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009; Gao et al. 2012).”