The Aquarius Project: the subhaloes of galactic haloes

By Volker Springel, Jie-Shuang Wang, M. Vogelsberger, A. Ludlow, Adrian Jenkins, A. Helmi, J. Navarro, Carlos S. Frenk, S. W. Mpa, Uvic and 3 more. 2008

1,488 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have performed the largest ever particle simulation of a Milky Way sized dark matter halo, and present the most comprehensive convergence study for an individual dark matter halo carried out thus far. We have also simulated a sample of six ultrahighly resolved Milky Way sized haloes, allowing us to estimate the halo-to-halo scatter in substructure statistics. In our largest simulation, we resolve nearly 300 000 gravitationally bound subhaloes within the virialized region of the halo. Simulations of the same object differing in mass resolution by factors of up to 1800 accurately reproduce the largest subhaloes with the same mass, maximum circular velocity and position, and yield good convergence for the abundance and internal properties of dark matter substructures. We detect up to four generations of subhaloes within subhaloes, but contrary to recent claims, we find less substructure in subhaloes than in the main halo when regions of equal mean overdensity are compared. The overall substructure mass fraction is much lower in subhaloes than in the main halo. Extrapolating the main halo's subhalo mass spectrum down to an Earth mass, we predict the mass fraction in substructure to be well below 3 per cent within 100 kpc, and to be below 0.1 per cent within the solar circle. The inner density profiles of subhaloes show no sign of converging to a fixed asymptotic slope and are well fitted by gently curving profiles of Einasto form. The mean concentrations of isolated haloes are accurately described by the fitting formula of Neto et al. down to maximum circular velocities of 1.5 km s(-1), an extrapolation over some five orders of magnitude in mass. However, at equal maximum circular velocity, subhaloes are more concentrated than field haloes, with a characteristic density that is typically similar to 2.6 times larger and increases with decreasing distance from halo centre.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

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 Ecology

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

Yule-Simpson’s paradox in Galactic Archaeology (2019, methodology): “As a first illustration of the YSP, we consider a cosmological zoom-in hydrodynamical simulation, using initial conditions from one of the Aquarius Project haloes (Springel et al. 2008; Scannapieco et al. 2009) and a Tree-PM SPH code.”
A BARYONIC SOLUTION TO THE MISSING SATELLITES PROBLEM (2012, background): “A slope of -1 is roughly the slope in the central regions for all halos formed in DM-only simulations (Navarro et al. 1997; Springel et al. 2008), and we verified that the inner density slopes in the VL2 subhalos are also consistent with -1.”
The properties of satellite galaxies in simulations of galaxy formation (2009, methodology): “To do this, we trace the dark matter particles of a particular subhalo in one of the simulations back to the initial conditions and search for a matched subhalo in the other simulation (see Springel et al. 2008).”
A Redshift-independent Efficiency Model: Star Formation and Stellar Masses in Dark Matter Halos at z ≳ 4 (2018, methodology): “The color volume was evolved from z = 127 to z = 0 using p-gadget-3 (Springel et al. 2008), an updated version of the publicly-available gadget-2 code (Springel et al. 2001b, 2005).”
The haloes of bright satellite galaxies in a warm dark matter universe (2011, methodology): “Springel et al. (2008) showed that it is possible to make precise matches between substructures at different resolutions for the Aq-A halo, allowing the numerical convergence of properties of substructures to be checked for individual c© 2011 RAS, MNRAS 000, ??”
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.”
Dark Matter Substructure in Numerical Simulations: A Tale of Discreteness Noise, Runaway Instabilities, and Artificial Disruption (2018, background): “In particular, a number of resolution and comparison studies (e.g., Springel et al. 2008; Onions et al. 2012; Knebe et al. 2013; van den Bosch & Jiang 2016; Griffen et al. 2016) have c© 2013 The Authors shown that subhalo mass functions are converged1 down to 50-100 particles per subhalo.”
SEARCH FOR GAMMA-RAY EMISSION FROM DES DWARF SPHEROIDAL GALAXY CANDIDATES WITH FERMI-LAT DATA (2015, background): “Current N-body cosmological simulations of Milky Waysized regions predict the existence of thousands of Galactic DM overdensities called subhalos (Diemand et al. 2008; Springel et al. 2008).”
Impact of baryon physics on dark matter structures: a detailed simulation study of halo density profiles (2010, background): “More recently, it has been shown that substructures themselves contain substructures, a pattern that shows no signs of abating (Stadel et al. 2009; Springel et al. 2008).”
The flattening of the concentration–mass relation towards low halo masses and its implications for the annihilation signal boost (2013, methodology): “…on the DM annihilation flux (frequently known as substructure boost) has already been studied extensively both analytically, e.g., Pieri et al. (2008); Lavalle et al. (2008); Mart́ınez et al. (2009), and making use of N-body simulations, e.g., Kuhlen et al. (2008); Springel et al. (2008).”
The Dynamical and Chemical Evolution of Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies with GEAR (2009, methodology): “First, we used the relation between the maximal velocity and halo mass measured in the Aquarius project (Springel et al. 2008).”
Subhaloes going Notts: the subhalo‐finder comparison project (2012, methodology): “…remains undispersed and so survives as separat structures within larger haloes is an important quantity for bothstudies of dark-matter detection (Springel et al. 2008; Kuhlen et al. 2008; Vogelsberger et al. 2009; Zavala et al. 2010) and the apparent ov rabundance of substructure within…”
Dark matter direct detection signals inferred from a cosmological N-body simulation with baryons (2009, background): “ 66] as well as improving computing capabilities have brought the possibility to extract galactic DM halos with tremendous resolution. The so-called Via Lactea simulation [67] or the Aquarius project [68] have resolved a Milky-Way sized galactic halo with more than a billion particles. It appears th”
Constraining the Milky Way assembly history with Galactic Archaeology (2016, methodology): “This is a full cosmological zoom-in hydro simulation, using initial conditions from one of the Aquarius Project haloes (Scannapieco et al., 2009; Springel et al., 2008).”
Subhaloes in self-interacting galactic dark matter haloes (2012, methodology): “Left panel: Ratio of the subhalo mass function for our different SIDM reference models to the best fit subhalo mass function of Springel et al. (2008).”
The impact of dark matter cusps and cores on the satellite galaxy population around spiral galaxies (2010, background): “…consequences for the discovery and interpretation of possible signals of dark matter annihilation in gamma-ray surveys (Stoehr et al. 2003; Diemand et al. 2007; Kuhlen et al. 2008; Springel et al. 2008b), since the strength of the signal goes with the square of the dark matter density.”