The masses and density profiles of halos in a LCDM galaxy formation simulation

By Matthieu Schaller, Carlos S. Frenk, Richard G. Bower, Tom Theuns, Adrian Jenkins, Joop Schaye, Robert A. Crain, Michelle Furlong, Claudio Dalla Vecchia, I. G. M. Icc and 4 more. 2014

280 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the internal structure and density profiles of halos of mass $10^{10}-10^{14}~M_\odot$ in the Evolution and Assembly of Galaxies and their Environment (EAGLE) simulations. These follow the formation of galaxies in a $\Lambda$CDM Universe and include a treatment of the baryon physics thought to be relevant. The EAGLE simulations reproduce the observed present-day galaxy stellar mass function, as well as many other properties of the galaxy population as a function of time. We find significant differences between the masses of halos in the EAGLE simulations and in simulations that follow only the dark matter component. Nevertheless, halos are well described by the Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) density profile at radii larger than ~5% of the virial radius but, closer to the centre, the presence of stars can produce cuspier profiles. Central enhancements in the total mass profile are most important in halos of mass $10^{12}-10^{13}M_\odot$, where the stellar fraction peaks. Over the radial range where they are well resolved, the resulting galaxy rotation curves are in very good agreement with observational data for galaxies with stellar mass $M_*<5\times10^{10}M_\odot$. We present an empirical fitting function that describes the total mass profiles and show that its parameters are strongly correlated with halo mass.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b33ab2ebaa9b6a04c6655608acafeb0040e3e209

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Citations in the corpus

The milky way total mass profile as inferred from Gaia DR2 (2019, methodology): “More general profiles, such as the Schaller et al. (2015) or the Dekel et al. (2017) ones, have more free parameters and potentially can provide a better match to the contracted halo profile.”
NIHAO – IV: core creation and destruction in dark matter density profiles across cosmic time (2015, background): “2013; Kravtsov et al. 2014), and hence our halo contraction is not due to unphysical overcooling as it happened in older simulations (e.g. Gnedin et al. 2004) and it is consistent with recent results from other groups on the same mass scale (Schaller et al. 2015).”
Weak Lensing Measurement of the Mass--Richness Relation of SDSS redMaPPer Clusters (2016, methodology): “Simulations that include baryonic cooling as well as AGN feedback have been used to study the impact of baryons on halo profiles (e.g., Schaller et al. 2015; Cui et al. 2016b; Bocquet et al. 2016).”
Baryon impact on the halo mass function: Fitting formulae and implications for cluster cosmology (2015, background): “Recently, various authors have investigated the baryonic impact on the halo HMF using hydrodynamic simulations (e.g. Cui et al. 2012; Cui, Borgani & Murante 2014; Cusworth et al. 2014; Martizzi et al. 2014; Velliscig et al. 2014; Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Schaller et al. 2015).”
Size evolution of normal and compact galaxies in the EAGLE simulation (2015, background): “…but other aspects of the model, such as the star formation rates (SFRs; Schaye et al. 2015), galaxy colours (Trayford et al. 2015), rotation curves (Schaller et al. 2015b), the gas content of galaxies (Lagos et al. 2015; Bahé et al. 2016), and the intergalactic hydrogen and metal absorption lines…”
The unexpected diversity of dwarf galaxy rotation curves (2015, background): “We emphasize that, although our simulations do not form ‘cores’, they do produce galaxies whose abundance, structural properties, and evolution seem in good accord with observational constraints (see e.g. Sawala et al. 2014; Schaller et al. 2015; Furlong et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015).”
Simulating galaxy formation with the IllustrisTNG model (2017, background): “…of the gas fraction within haloes, the former producing a non-monotonic function at masses & 1011M (red curve in Figure 8; also Genel et al. 2014) and the latter having a monotonically rising gas fraction across the whole mass range between 1011M and a few ×1014M (Figure 3 of Schaller et al. 2015).”
The APOSTLE simulations: solutions to the Local Group's cosmic puzzles (2015, methodology): “In agreement with Sawala et al. (2013) and Schaller et al. (2015a), we find that while the more massive haloes of vmax > 100 km s−1, such as those that host the MW and M31 are not significantly affected by baryonic effects, the haloes of dwarf galaxies end up being less massive than their DMO…”
Small scale problems of the $\Lambda$CDM model: a short review (2016, background): “In addition, [139] got realistic galaxies in simulations, but formed no cores.”
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).”
FIRE in the field: Simulating the threshold of galaxy formation (2016, background): “…baryonic versions of their simulations have virial masses that are suppressed by an additional 10-15% beyond the correction for fb for low-mass halos (Schaller et al. 2015; Vogelsberger et al. 2014, though Vogelsberger et al. find an average baryon fraction that is close to cosmic at the 1010 M…”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “On cluster scales, simulations show anything from steeper-than-NFW cusps to mild cores [380, 377, 379].”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 results: weak lensing mass calibration of redMaPPer galaxy clusters (2018, background): “Given that our fits allowed the concentration parameter of each cluster stack to float with no informative priors, we naively expect the impact of baryonic physics can be absorbed into the concentration of each cluster stack (Schaller et al. 2015).”
The Auriga Project: the properties and formation mechanisms of disc galaxies across cosmic time (2016, methodology): “…method, such as pressure-based SPH (Read, Hayfield & Agertz 2010; Saitoh & Makino 2013) and the inclusion of artificial thermal conductivity, have improved the situation somewhat, particularly with regard to the mixing and hydrodynamical instabilities (Agertz et al. 2011; Schaller et al. 2015b).”
The KMOS Redshift One Spectroscopic Survey (KROSS):dynamical properties, gas and dark matter fractions of typical z~1 star-forming galaxies (2016, background): “2 by studying the output of the state-of-the-art Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments (EAGLE) hydrodynamic simulation (Schaller et al. 2015; Crain et al. 2015; McAlpine et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015).”
The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: the importance of the hydrodynamics scheme (2015, background): “…et al. submitted), the evolution of the galaxy stellar mass function (Furlong et al. 2015), the column density distribution of intergalactic metals (Schaye et al. 2015) and H I (Rahmati et al. 2015) as well as galaxy rotation curves (Schaller et al. 2015) and luminosities (Trayford et al. 2015).”
The Frontier Fields lens modelling comparison project (2016, methodology): “With the exception of the 10 brightest cluster galaxies, the relative masses of all cluster galaxies are fixed, and are derived using a stellar mass-dark matter mass relation found in the EAGLE cosmological hydrodynamical simulation (Schaller et al. 2015).”