The haloes of bright satellite galaxies in a warm dark matter universe

By M. Lovell, V. Eke, Carlos S. Frenk, Liang Gao, Adrian Jenkins, Tom Theuns, Jie-Shuang Wang, Simon D. M. White, Alexey Boyarsky, Oleg Ruchayskiy. 2011

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High-resolution N-body simulations of galactic cold dark matter haloes indicate that we should expect to find a few satellite galaxies around the Milky Way whose haloes have a maximum circular velocity in excess of 40 km s-1. Yet, with the exception of the Magellanic Clouds and the Sagittarius dwarf, which likely reside in subhaloes with significantly larger velocities than this, the bright satellites of the Milky Way all appear to reside in subhaloes with maximum circular velocities below 40 km s-1. As recently highlighted by Boylan-Kolchin et al., this discrepancy implies that the majority of the most massive subhaloes within a cold dark matter galactic halo are too concentrated to be consistent with the kinematic data for the bright Milky Way satellites. Here we show that no such discrepancy exists if haloes are made of warm rather than cold dark matter because these haloes are less concentrated on account of their typically later formation epochs. Warm dark matter is one of several possible explanations for the observed kinematics of the satellites.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/25254961d37be266d9b1eceaee8709e6a586ae74

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Citations in the corpus

The APOSTLE simulations: solutions to the Local Group's cosmic puzzles (2015, unknown): “The lack of a single model able to reconcile all of the LG observations with CDM predictions has led to renewed interest in alternatives to CDM, such as warm (e.g. Lovell et al. 2012) or self-interacting dark matter (e.g. Rocha et al. 2013; Vogelsberger et al. 2014).”
New production mechanism for keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter by decays of frozen-in scalars (2013, background): “nonrelativistic DM (CDM), provides a very good fit to the data [4], the intermediate case of warm Dark Matter (WDM) is still a valid possibility [5–10, 10–13].”
A BARYONIC SOLUTION TO THE MISSING SATELLITES PROBLEM (2012, background): “…(depending on the temperature at which the WIMPs undergo kinetic decoupling with the cosmic neutrino background), the formation of small scale structure can be strongly suppressed if the dark matter particles are not entirely cold (Coĺın et al. 2000; Macciò & Fontanot 2010; Lovell et al. 2012).”
WIMP dark matter candidates and searches—current status and future prospects (2017, background): “However, these results were not confirmed by the germanium CDMS-II [190] and SuperCDMS [191] detectors and there is no plausible DM halo function for which this tension could be alleviated unless one assumes, e.g. exothermic DM with Ge-phobic interactions as discussed in [192].”
Dark matter halo merger histories beyond cold dark matter – I. Methods and application to warm dark matter (2012, background): “…phenomenology (Markevitch et al. 2004; Ahn & Shapiro 2005; Boehm & Schaeffer 2005; Miranda & Macciò 2007; Randall et al. 2008; Boyarsky et al. 2009; Lovell et al. 2012) E-mail: abenson@obs.carnegiescience.edu and several different particle physics candidates for dark matter (Raffelt 1990; Turner…”
The warm dark matter halo mass function below the cut-off scale (2013, methodology): “Some of the measures introduced in Abel et al. (2012) or methods inspecting the shape of the Lagrangian patch of the identified structures (such as that proposed by e.g. Lovell et al. 2012) may help in automating such a procedure.”
The impact of baryonic physics on the structure of dark matter haloes: the view from the FIRE cosmological simulations (2015, background): “Examples include warm dark matter (WDM), whose free streaming can suppress the small scale structure (Abazajian 2006; Dunstan et al. 2011; Lovell et al. 2012) and self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) whose interaction can substantially affect the central density profile of halos (e.g. Yoshida et al.…”
WHY BARYONS MATTER: THE KINEMATICS OF DWARF SPHEROIDAL SATELLITES (2012, methodology): “…CDM model have led some researchers to propose alternative forms of dark matter (e.g., warm or self-interacting) to reduce the central masses of satellites (Macciò & Fontanot 2010; Vogelsberger et al. 2012; Lovell et al. 2012; Anderhalden et al. 2013; Shao et al. 2013; Polisensky & Ricotti 2013).”
The Milky Way’s bright satellites as an apparent failure of ΛCDM (2011, background): “Indeed, Lovell et al. (2012) have already examined the structure of a version of the Aquarius A halo simulated in a Warm Dark Matter cosmology.”
Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND): Observational Phenomenology and Relativistic Extensions (2011, background): “This means that subtly changing some parameters of the model (like, e.g., swapping CDM for WDM, making DM more self-interacting, etc.) might help solving at least a few of them.”