There's no place like home? Statistics of Milky Way-mass dark matter haloes

By M. Boylan-Kolchin, Volker Springel, Simon D. M. White, Adrian Jenkins. 2009

186 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present an analysis of the distribution of structural properties for Milky Way-mass haloes in the Millennium-II Simulation (MS-II). This simulation of structure formation within the standard ACDM cosmology contains thousands of Milky Way-mass haloes and has sufficient resolution to properly resolve many subhaloes per host. It thus provides a major improvement in the statistical power available to explore the distribution of internal structure for haloes of this mass. In addition, the MS-II contains lower-resolution versions of the Aquarius Project haloes, allowing us to compare our results to simulations of six haloes at a much higher resolution. We study the distributions of mass assembly histories, of subhalo mass functions and accretion times and of merger and stripping histories for subhaloes capable of impacting discs at the centres of haloes. We show that subhalo abundances are not well described by Poisson statistics at low mass, but rather are dominated by intrinsic scatter. Using the masses of subhaloes at infall and the abundance-matching assumption, there is less than a 10 per cent chance that a Milky Way halo with M vir = 10 12 M ⊙ will host two galaxies as bright as the Magellanic Clouds. This probability rises to ∼25 per cent for a halo with M vir = 2.5 × 10 12 M ⊙ . The statistics relevant for disc heating are very sensitive to the mass range that is considered relevant. Mergers with infall mass: redshift zero virial mass greater than 1:30 could well impact a central galactic disc and are a near inevitability since z = 2, whereas only half of all haloes have had a merger with infall mass: redshift zero virial mass greater than 1:10 over this same period.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/765c1c9930a6991944875af5c4458393a1164990

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Citations in the corpus

Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, background): “…et al. 2017), as the nearly self-similar nature of dark matter substructure implies that the LMC – which is likely to be hosted by a halo of Mpeak ∼ 1011 M (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2010) – could itself contain multiple dark matter satellites above the mass threshold required for galaxy formation.”
The Local Group on FIRE: dwarf galaxy populations across a suite of hydrodynamic simulations (2018, background): “We also remind the reader that the hydrodynamic versions of these haloes underproduce the SMFs; if this is due to the masses of our hosts, then we would expect to also underproduce the halo mass function, which scales closely with host mass (e.g. Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2010).”
The merger rates and mass assembly histories of dark matter haloes in the two Millennium simulations (2010, methodology): “The assembly history of Milky Way-size haloes is of particular interest; see Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2009) and references therein for a detailed statistical study of this topic.”
The mass distribution and gravitational potential of the Milky Way (2016, background): “We take a prior on concentration, cv′ , from Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2010)4 who found that, for the mass range that the Milky Way’s halo is very likely to lie in, the 4 There are varying definitions of the virial radius, and in this case the definition is the radius of a sphere with average density…”
Too big to fail in the Local Group (2014, background): “…dwarf irregular Magellanic Clouds are removed from the sample because satellites as large as the Magellanic Clouds are rare around MW-size hosts (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2010; Busha et al. 2011; Tollerud et al. 2011; Robotham et al. 2012), and therefore do not have corresponding subhaloes in many…”
The shape of dark matter haloes in the Aquarius simulations: evolution and memory (2011, background): “…2011 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–11 with a relatively quiescent merger history (mass ratios lower than 1:5) after z ∼ 2 (for a detailed comparison of the Aquarius haloes’ mass accretion history with respect to the general expectations for haloes of similar virial mass see Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2010).”
ELVIS: Exploring the Local Volume in Simulations (2013, methodology): “The blue dashed line, which sits practically on top of the ELVIS means, shows the mean power-law fit obtained by Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2010) for subhaloes in a large sample of MW-mass haloes from the Millennium-II Simulation (MS-II; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009).”
Cosmological simulations of the formation of the stellar haloes around disc galaxies (2011, background): “…as Msat/Mdisc > 1/3, where Msat is the total mass of the satellite and Mdisc is the stellar mass of the disc) in the last 10 Gyr (Stewart et al. 2008; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2010), implying that the majority of merger histories may be excluded from studies that select only quiescent histories.”
Galactic Searches for Dark Matter (2012, background): “Modern kinematic measurements indicate that the Magellanic Clouds have maximum circular velocities & 60 km/s (van der Marel et al., 2002; Stanimirović et al., 2004).”
Erratum: From dwarf spheroidals to cD galaxies: simulating the galaxy population in a ΛCDM cosmology (2010, methodology): “We build virtual catalogues of the galaxy population by implementing galaxy formation models on the stored output of two very large cosmological N-body simulations, the Millennium Simulation (MS, Springel et al. 2005) and the Millennium-II Simulation (MS-II Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009).”
Evidence for an Intermediate-mass Milky Way from Gaia DR2 Halo Globular Cluster Motions (2018, background): “…as low as ∼ 0.5 × 1012 M (e.g. Watkins et al. 2010, radial anisotropy with Leo I unbound) to as high as 2−3×1012M from abundance-matching studies (e.g. Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2010), the timing argument (Li & White 2008; van der Marel et al. 2012b), or studies of tracers (e.g. Watkins et al.…”
Mass models of the Milky Way (2011, background): “…predict that typical halo concentration varies with halo mass, but typically only weakly (e.g. cv ∝ M −0.1 v , Neto et al. 2007) when compared to the intrinsic scatter in c at a given virial mass, so we accept the relationship given by Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2010) as stated, independent of Mv′ .”
DARK MATTER HALOS IN THE STANDARD COSMOLOGICAL MODEL: RESULTS FROM THE BOLSHOI SIMULATION (2010, methodology): “However, it is important to appreciate that this simulation and the more recent Millennium-II simulation (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009, MS-II) used the first-year (WMAP1) cosmological parameters, which are rather different from the current parameters summarized in Table 1.”
The Milky Way’s bright satellites as an apparent failure of ΛCDM (2011, methodology): “While few of the simulated halos have subhalos massive enough to host the MW’s brightest satellites, the Magellanic Clouds (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2010, 2011a; Busha et al. 2011), the agreement on the dSph scale (MV > −14) is remarkably good in 5 of the 7 halos.”
The formation of disc galaxies in high-resolution moving-mesh cosmological simulations (2013, background): “Its halo forms comparatively early for systems of this mass (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2010), thus favouring the unperturbed growth of a nice disc over an extended period of time.”
ROBUST OPTICAL RICHNESS ESTIMATION WITH REDUCED SCATTER (2011, background): “While recent work indicates the scatter may be significantly super-Poisson at the cluster scale (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2010; Wetzel & White 2010; Busha et al. 2011), even in this case the intrinsic scatter is expected to be closer to σln M|N = 0.20–0.25 rather than 0.45 at M200 ∼ 2×1014 M , so it…”
Cosmological Constraints from a Combination of Galaxy Clustering and Lensing -- III. Application to SDSS Data (2012, background): “Additional support comes from numerical simulations which show that dark matter subhaloes (which are believed to host satellite galaxies) also follow Poisson statistics (e.g., Kravtsov et al. 2004).”
Halo and subhalo demographics with Planck cosmological parameters: Bolshoi–Planck and MultiDark–Planck simulations (2016, methodology): “Following Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2010), in this paper we parametrise the mean cumulative number of subhalos at a given host halo mass, Mvir, as 〈Nsub(> Msub|Mvir)〉 = µ0 ( µ µ1 )a exp [ − ( µ µcut )b ] , (37) µ0 = (Mvir,12) c (38) where µ = Msub/Mvir and µ0 is a normalisation term that depends on…”