Clumps and streams in the local dark matter distribution

By Juerg Diemand, Michael Kuhlen, P. Madau, Marcel Zemp, B. Moore, D. Potter, Joachim Stadel. Nature, 2008

815 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In cold dark matter cosmological models, structures form and grow through the merging of smaller units. Numerical simulations have shown that such merging is incomplete; the inner cores of haloes survive and orbit as ‘subhaloes’ within their hosts. Here we report a simulation that resolves such substructure even in the very inner regions of the Galactic halo. We find hundreds of very concentrated dark matter clumps surviving near the solar circle, as well as numerous cold streams. The simulation also reveals the fractal nature of dark matter clustering: isolated haloes and subhaloes contain the same relative amount of substructure and both have cusped inner density profiles. The inner mass and phase-space densities of subhaloes match those of recently discovered faint, dark-matter-dominated dwarf satellite galaxies, and the overall amount of substructure can explain the anomalous flux ratios seen in strong gravitational lenses. Subhaloes boost γ-ray production from dark matter annihilation by factors of 4 to 15 relative to smooth galactic models. Local cosmic ray production is also enhanced, typically by a factor of 1.4 but by a factor of more than 10 in one per cent of locations lying sufficiently close to a large subhalo. (These estimates assume that the gravitational effects of baryons on dark matter substructure are small.)

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df71f416576de9d18187a27fb73128389abff593

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Citations in the corpus

Resolving cosmic structure formation with the Millennium-II simulation (2009, background): “An alternative tack is to focus all of one’s computational resources on the formation of a single galaxy-mass halo, thus allowing substantially enhanced mass resolution (Diemand et al. 2007, 2008; Springel et al. 2008; Stadel et al. 2008).”
Sweating the small stuff: simulating dwarf galaxies, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, and their own tiny satellites (2015, background): “Dark-matter only simulations over a vast range of particle masses and physical scales show that substructure persists down to the resolution limit of ΛCDM simulations (Diemand et al. 2008; Madau et al. 2008; Springel et al. 2008; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009; Klypin, Trujillo-Gomez & Primack 2011).”
Impact of baryon physics on dark matter structures: a detailed simulation study of halo density profiles (2010, methodology): “…combined with ever more efficient N-body codes, have permitted accurate numerical tests of structure formation in a Cold Dark Matter (CDM) universe (e.g. Klypin et al. 1996; Navarro et al. 1997; Moore et al. 1999; Bullock et al. 2001; Springel et al. 2005; Diemand et al. 2008; Gao et al. 2008).”
The Dark Matter Crisis: Falsification of the Current Standard Model of Cosmology (2012, background): “Within its virialised region, the spatial distribution of sub-structure in a present-day DM host halo closely follows that of its DM distribution (Diemand et al. 2008).”
Subhaloes in self-interacting galactic dark matter haloes (2012, methodology): “We note that we only consider scatter events between high resolution particles, i.e. massive boundary particles behave like CDM. 2 We note that Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2011b) also did the analysis using data from the Via-Lactea simulations (Diemand et al. 2008) and found the same problem.”
Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, result): “Their comparison of observed central masses to ΛCDM predictions from the Aquarius (Springel et al. 2008) and Via Lactea II (Diemand et al. 2008) simulations revealed that the most massive ΛCDM subhalos were systematically too centrally dense to host the bright Milky Way satellites (Boylan-Kolchin,…”
Moving mesh cosmology: numerical techniques and global statistics (2011, background): “This is especially evident for the CDM component, where the relevant calculations have reached a high level of sophistication (e.g. Springel et al. 2005b, 2008; Diemand et al. 2008; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2010; Klypin, Trujillo-Gomez & Primack 2011).”
Effect of Sun and Planet-Bound Dark Matter on Planet and Satellite Dynamics in the Solar System (2010, neutral): “so that it could be imagined that the solar system is surrounded by a local subhalo, a suggestion reinforced by recent simulations [11].”
A COMPLETE SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF THE MILKY WAY SATELLITE SEGUE 1: THE DARKEST GALAXY (2010, methodology): “Such halos are indeed found in the most advanced current N-body simulations (Diemand et al. 2008; Springel et al. 2008), demonstrating that the density of Segue 1 is reasonable in a ΛCDM universe, but how common it is for galaxies of Segue 1’s luminosity to be found in very massive subhalos is not…”
Dark Matter Searches with Astroparticle Data (2011, methodology): “Models based on many-body simulations, such as Via Lactea-II (Diemand et al., 2008), Aquarius (Springel et al., 2008), or GHALO (Zemp, 2009), are candidates, but multiple realizations of a given model are needed in order to account statistically for the unknown position of the Solar System with resp”
Colloquium: Annual modulation of dark matter (2013, methodology): “High-resolution cosmological dark matter simulations, such as Via Lactea (Diemand, Kuhlen, and Madau, 2007; Diemand et al., 2008), GHALO (Stadel et al., 2008), and Aquarius (Springel et al., 2008), find residual substructure from the merging process that includes dark matter clumps, cold streams,…”
Dark matter direct-detection experiments (2015, background): “matter [152][153][154][155] and showed triaxial velocity distributions [151].”
Constraints on dark matter annihilation in clusters of galaxies with the Fermi large area telescope (2010, methodology): “of dark matter substructures in cluster and galaxy halos [30, 31].”
Hundreds of Milky Way Satellites? Luminosity Bias in the Satellite Luminosity Function (2008, background): “Although the masses within these scales are difficult to resolve with the Via Lactea simulation we consider in this paper, this mass scale will be wellresolved in Via Lactea II (Diemand et al. 2008) and forthcoming simulations.”
SUBSTRUCTURE DEPLETION IN THE MILKY WAY HALO BY THE DISK (2009, methodology): “Diemand et al. (2008) and Springel et al. (2008b) have computed the dark matter annihilation signal from the galactic substructures and from the smooth dark matter halo of the Milky Way using very high resolution cosmological Via Lactea II and Aquarius simulations, respectively.”
The discovery of Segue 2: a prototype of the population of satellites of satellites (2009, background): “Satellites of satellites are only resolved in the mostrecent dark matter cosmological simulations of the Milky Way halo (Diemand et al. 2008), but not yet in more realistic fully hydrodynamical simulations that account for the various mechanisms to which baryons are subject.”
Phase-space structure in the local dark matter distribution and its signature in direct detection experiments (2008, methodology): “Simulations of individual Milky Way haloes of similar scale have been carried out and analysed by Diemand et al. (2008), Zemp et al. (2009) and Stadel et al. (2008).”