Quantifying the heart of darkness with GHALO – a multibillion particle simulation of a galactic halo

By Joachim Stadel, D. Potter, B. Moore, J. Diemand, P. Madau, Marcel Zemp, Michael Kuhlen, Vicent Quilis. 2008

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We perform a series of simulations of a Galactic mass dark matter halo at different resolutions: our largest uses over 3 billion particles and has a mass resolution of 1000 M⊙. We quantify the structural properties of the inner dark matter distribution and study how they depend on numerical resolution. We can measure the density profile to a distance of 120 pc (0.05 per cent of Rvir), where the logarithmic slope is −0.8 and −1.4 at (0.5 per cent of Rvir). We propose a new two-parameter fitting function that has a linearly varying logarithmic density gradient over the resolved radii which fits the GHALO and VL2 density profiles extremely well. Convergence in the halo shape is achieved at roughly three times the convergence radius for the density profile at which point the halo becomes more spherical due to numerical resolution. The six-dimensional phase-space profile is dominated by the presence of the substructures and does not follow a power law, except in the central few kpc which is devoid of substructure even at this resolution. The quantity, ρ/σ3, which is often used as a proxy for the six-dimensional phase-space density should be used with caution.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d3702e52f585e5cf19c6ca627fdb66b43f3a23ef

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Citations in the corpus

There's no place like home? Statistics of Milky Way-mass dark matter haloes (2009, background): “…standard picture of a smooth, virialized dark matter halo c© 2010 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–19 in total only a small fraction of the mass of the dominant subhalo, even in the highest resolution simulations currently possible (Gao et al. 2004; Springel et al. 2008; Diemand et al. 2008; Stadel et al. 2009).”
Cores in warm dark matter haloes: a Catch 22 problem (2012, methodology): “In order to quantify the flatness (and the core size) of WDM profiles we have fitted all our density profiles with the following parametric description, originally presented in Stadel et al. (2009): ρ(r) = ρ0 exp(−λ[ln(1 + r/Rλ)]2).”
Cosmological simulations with self-interacting dark matter – II. Halo shapes versus observations (2012, neutral): “E-mail: annika.peter@uci.edu † E-mail: rocham@uci.edu ‡ E-mail: bullock@uci.edu § E-mail: mkapling@uci.edu quantitative level (Dubinski & Carlberg 1991; Diemand et al. 2008; Vogelsberger et al. 2009; Stadel et al. 2009; Navarro et al. 2010).”
THE SPACE MOTION OF LEO I: THE MASS OF THE MILKY WAY'S DARK MATTER HALO (2012, result): “In the Appendix, we compare results from similarly wellresolved halos—VL-II and GHALO (Stadel et al. 2009)—using WMAP3 parameters to show this explicitly.”
The Phoenix Project: the dark side of rich galaxy clusters (2012, methodology): “…scale of individual galaxies, these key predictions have been confirmed and refined by the latest simulation work, in particular the Via Lactea simulation series (Diemand et al. 2007), the GHALO simulation (Stadel et al. 2009) and the Aquarius Project (Springel et al. 2008b,a; Navarro et al. 2010).”
Multi-scale initial conditions for cosmological simulations (2011, background): “…Society C© 2011 RAS nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /m nras/article/415/3/2101/1045260 by guest on 18 January 2022 e.g. Prunet et al. 2008; Stadel et al. 2009) and subsequently degraded by either averaging over regions of 23d particles, where d is the de-refinement factor outside the…”
THE CENTRAL SLOPE OF DARK MATTER CORES IN DWARF GALAXIES: SIMULATIONS VERSUS THINGS (2010, background): “It is worth mentioning that recent simulations show shallower slopes with α ∼−0.8 at radii of 120 pc (Stadel et al. 2009) although DM slopes at r < 1 kpc are generally steeper (see also Navarro et al. 2010).”
Cuspy No More: How Outflows Affect the Central Dark Matter and Baryon Distribution in Lambda CDM Galaxies (2012, background): “…simulations predict that DM halos should follow a quasi– universal Einasto profile (Navarro et al. 1996b; Moore et al. 1999; Reed et al. 2005; Macciò et al. 2009; Stadel et al. 2009; Navarro et al. 2010), defined by a power law density profile ρ ∝ rα with −1.5 < α < −1 in their central regions.”