The impact of baryonic physics on the structure of dark matter haloes: the view from the FIRE cosmological simulations

By Tsang Keung Chan, D. Kerevs, J. Oñorbe, P. Hopkins, A. Muratov, C. Faucher-Giguére, E. Diego, Mpia, Caltech, Northwestern and 1 more. 2015

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We study the distribution of cold dark matter (CDM) in cosmological simulations from the FIRE (Feedback In Realistic Environments) project, for M_* ∼ 10^(4–11) M_⊙ galaxies in M_h ∼ 10^(9–12) M_⊙ haloes. FIRE incorporates explicit stellar feedback in the multiphase interstellar medium, with energetics from stellar population models. We find that stellar feedback, without ‘fine-tuned’ parameters, greatly alleviates small-scale problems in CDM. Feedback causes bursts of star formation and outflows, altering the DM distribution. As a result, the inner slope of the DM halo profile (α) shows a strong mass dependence: profiles are shallow at M_h ∼ 10^(10)–10^(11) M_⊙ and steepen at higher/lower masses. The resulting core sizes and slopes are consistent with observations. This is broadly consistent with previous work using simpler feedback schemes, but we find steeper mass dependence of α, and relatively late growth of cores. Because the star formation efficiency M_*/M_h is strongly halo mass dependent, a rapid change in α occurs around M_h ∼ 10^(10) M_⊙ (M_* ∼ 10^6–10^7 M_⊙), as sufficient feedback energy becomes available to perturb the DM. Large cores are not established during the period of rapid growth of haloes because of ongoing DM mass accumulation. Instead, cores require several bursts of star formation after the rapid build-up has completed. Stellar feedback dramatically reduces circular velocities in the inner kpc of massive dwarfs; this could be sufficient to explain the ‘Too Big To Fail’ problem without invoking non-standard DM. Finally, feedback and baryonic contraction in Milky Way-mass haloes produce DM profiles slightly shallower than the Navarro–Frenk–White profile, consistent with the normalization of the observed Tully–Fisher relation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a40fe6478c1f76e55081f91a92deb61aed4757cc

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Citations in the corpus

Black holes on FIRE: stellar feedback limits early feeding of galactic nuclei (2017, background): “In such galaxies, inefficient BH growth may correlate with the formation of dark matter cores and stellar size fluctuations driven by stellar feedback (e.g. Chan et al. 2015; El-Badry et al. 2016).”
ETHOS - an effective theory of structure formation: dark matter physics as a possible explanation of the small-scale CDM problems (2015, background): “…be driven by sufficiently strong supernova feedback (e.g. Navarro et al. 1996; Pontzen & Governato 2012; Sawala et al. 2016; Gillet et al. 2015; Chan et al. 2015; Brook & Di Cintio 2015), while gas heating during the reionisation era might prevent the gas from cooling and forming stars…”
Gusty, gaseous flows of FIRE: Galactic winds in cosmological simulations with explicit stellar feedback (2015, methodology): “At low redshift, as m12i has significantly increased in mass and central density (Chan et al. 2015), dense gas can persist.”
The Local Group on FIRE: dwarf galaxy populations across a suite of hydrodynamic simulations (2018, background): “…1 kpc. galaxies are at the centres of haloes that reached ∼1010.5 M (Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014a), previous work has shown that mass scale to be the most susceptible to core formation and stellar migration due to supernovae feedback (Di Cintio et al. 2014b; Chan et al. 2015; El-Badry et al. 2016).”
Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, result): “…while many independent groups are now obtaining similar results in cosmological simulations of dwarf galaxies (Governato et al. 2012; Munshi et al. 2013; Madau, Shen & Governato 2014; Chan et al. 2015; Oñorbe et al. 2015; Tollet et al. 2016; Fitts et al. 2016) – indicating a threshold mass of M?”
NIHAO – IV: core creation and destruction in dark matter density profiles across cosmic time (2015, result): “…mass ratio of these galaxies,compared to our NIHAO sample, is taken into account the results are in very good in agreement. c© 2015 RAS, MNRAS000, 1–11 A similar agreement is also found when comparing our rusults with recent simulations presented by the FIRE collaboration in Chan et al. (2015).”
FIRE in the field: Simulating the threshold of galaxy formation (2016, background): “Most modern high-resolution simulation suites are designed to cover a wide range of halo masses (Munshi et al. 2013; Chan et al. 2015; Wang et al. 2015; Sawala et al. 2016).”
BREATHING FIRE: HOW STELLAR FEEDBACK DRIVES RADIAL MIGRATION, RAPID SIZE FLUCTUATIONS, AND POPULATION GRADIENTS IN LOW-MASS GALAXIES (2015, methodology): “For further details, see Hopkins et al. (2014) and Chan et al. (2015).”
(Star)bursts of FIRE: observational signatures of bursty star formation in galaxies (2015, background): “…dark matter halos because SFR variability on timescales less than the local orbital period of dark matter particles can turn dark matter cusps into cores (Pontzen & Governato 2012, see also Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2013; Di Cintio et al. 2014; Oñorbe et al. 2015; Chan et al. 2015; Read et al. 2016).”
Dynamical modelling of the galactic bulge and bar: the Milky Way's pattern speed, stellar and dark matter mass distribution (2016, background): “Such processes are the resonance effects of a large primordial stellar bar (Weinberg & Katz 2002; but see Dubinski et al. 2009), supernova feedback (Pontzen & Governato 2012) and stellar feedback (Chan et al. 2015; Schaller et al. 2015; but see Marinacci et al. 2014).”
Not so lumpy after all: modelling the depletion of dark matter subhaloes by Milky Way-like galaxies (2017, background): “…in this field (e.g. di Cintio et al. 2011; Governato et al. 2012; Pontzen & Governato 2012; Zolotov et al. 2012; Brooks & Zolotov 2014; Arraki et al. 2014; Sawala et al. 2015; Di Cintio et al. 2014; Oñorbe et al. 2015; Chan et al. 2015; Sawala et al. 2016b; Cui et al. 2016; Wetzel et al. 2016).”
The stellar mass-halo mass relation of isolated field dwarfs : a critical test of ΛCDM at the edge of galaxy formation (2016, background): “Some recent simulations favour a high Mreion ∼ 1010 M (e.g. Chan et al. 2015; Tollet et al. 2015), while others favour a much lower Mreion ∼ 5 × 108 M (Gnedin & Kaurov 2014), consistent with the assumption of no reionisation in R16a.”
NIHAO - XI. Formation of ultra-diffuse galaxies by outflows (2016, background): “…cause expansion not only of the central DM distribution in galaxies (e.g. Governato et al. 2010; Di Cintio et al. 2014a,b; Oñorbe et al. 2015; Tollet et al. 2016; Chan et al. 2015; Read et al. 2016), but also of the stellar one (e.g. Teyssier et al. 2013; ElBadry et al. 2016; Dutton et al. 2016).”
FIRE-2 simulations: physics versus numerics in galaxy formation (2017, methodology): “We consider a series of halos with different masses; many of these are chosen to match the halos from our FIRE-1 studies (specifically simulations first presented in Hopkins et al. 2014 and Chan et al. 2015).”