We explore the boundary of dark matter haloes through their bias and velocity profiles. Using cosmological $N$-body simulations, we show that the bias profile exhibits a ubiquitous trough that can be interpreted as created by halo accretion that depletes material around the boundary. The inner edge of the active depletion region is marked by the location of the maximum mass inflow rate that separates a growing halo from the draining environment. This inner depletion radius can also be interpreted as the radius enclosing a highly complete population of splashback orbits, and matches the optimal exclusion radius in a halo model of the large-scale structure. The minimum of the bias trough defines a characteristic depletion radius, which is located within the infall region bounded by the inner depletion radius and the turnaround radius, while approaching the turnaround radius in low mass haloes that have stopped mass accretion. The characteristic depletion radius depends the most on halo mass and environment. It is approximately $2.5$ times the virial radius and encloses an average density of $\sim 40$ times the background density of the universe, independent on halo mass but dependent on other halo properties. The inner depletion radius is smaller by $10-20\%$ and encloses an average density of $\sim 63$ times the background density. These radii open a new window for studying the properties of haloes.
The formation of supermassive stars has generally been studied under the assumption of rapid accretion of pristine metal-free gas. Recently it was found, however, that gas enriched to metallicities up to $Z \sim 10^{-3}$ Z$_{\odot}$ can also facilitate supermassive star formation, as long as the total mass infall rate onto the protostar remains sufficiently high. We extend the analysis further by examining how the abundance of supermassive star candidate haloes would be affected if all haloes with super-critical infall rates, regardless of metallicity were included. We investigate this scenari…
We analyse the gas content evolution of infalling haloes in cluster environments from THE THREE HUNDRED project, a collection of 324 numerically modelled galaxy clusters. The haloes in our sample were selected within $5R_{200}$ of the main cluster halo at $z=0$ and have total halo mass $M_{200}\geq10^{11} h^{-1} M_{\odot}$. We track their main progenitors and study their gas evolution since their crossing into the infall region, which we define as $1-4R_{200}$. Studying the radial trends of our populations using both the full phase space information and a line-of-sight projection, we confirm t…
We present distributions of orbital parameters of infalling satellites of $Λ$CDM haloes in the mass range $10^{12}-10^{14}$M$_\odot$, which represent the initial conditions for the subsequent evolution of substructures within the host halo. We use merger trees constructed in a high resolution cosmological N-body simulation to trace satellite haloes, and identify the time of infall. We find signficant trends in the distribution of orbital parameters with both the host halo mass and the ratio of satellite-to-host halo masses. For all host halo masses, satellites whose infall mass is a larger fra…
The density profiles of dark matter haloes can potentially probe dynamics, fundamental physics, and cosmology, but some of the most promising signals reside near or beyond the virial radius. While these scales have recently become observable, the profiles at large radii are still poorly understood theoretically, chiefly because the distribution of orbiting matter (the one-halo term) is partially concealed by particles falling into halos for the first time. We present an algorithm to dynamically disentangle the orbiting and infalling contributions by counting the pericentric passages of billion…
We have performed cosmo-hydro simulations using the RAMSES code to study atomic cooling (ACHs) haloes at z=10 with masses 5E7Msun<~M<~2E9Msun. We assume primordial gas and H2-cooling and prior star-formation have been suppressed. We analysed 19 haloes (gas and DM) at a resolution of ~10 (proper) pc, selected from a total volume of ~2E3 (comoving) Mpc3. This is the largest statistical hydro-sim. study of ACHs at z>10 to date. We examine the morphology, angular momentum (AM), thermodynamic, and turbulence of these haloes, in order to assess the prevalence of disks and supermassive black holes (S…
We perform a statistical analysis of the peculiar velocity field around dark matter haloes in numerical simulations. We examine different properties of the infall of material onto haloes and its relation to central halo shapes and the shape of the large scale surrounding regions (LSSR). We find that the amplitude of the infall velocity field along the halo shape minor axis is larger than that along the major axis. This is consistent for general triaxial haloes, and for both prolate and oblate systems. We also report a strong anisotropy of the velocity field along the principal axes of the LSSR…
We investigate the population of dwarf galaxies with stellar masses similar to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and M33 in the EAGLE galaxy formation simulation. In the field, galaxies reside in haloes with stellar-to-halo mass ratios of $1.03^{+0.50}_{-0.31}\times10^{-2}$ (68% confidence level); systems like the LMC, which have an SMC-mass satellite, reside in haloes about 1.3 times more massive, which suggests an LMC halo mass at infall, $M_{200}=3.4^{+1.8}_{-1.2}\times10^{11}M_\odot$ (68% confidence level). The colour distribution of dwarfs is bimodal, with the red galaxies ($g-r>0.6$) bein…
The density profiles of dark matter haloes are commonly described by fitting functions such as the NFW or Einasto models, but these approximations break down in the transition region where halos become dominated by newly accreting matter. Here we present a simple, accurate new fitting function that is inspired by the asymptotic shapes of the separate orbiting and infalling halo components. The orbiting term is described as a truncated Einasto profile, $ρ_{\rm orb} \propto \exp \left[-2/α (r / r_{\rm s})^α- 1/β (r / r_{\rm t})^β\right]$, with a five-parameter space of normalization, physically …
We use the APOSTLE cosmological hydrodynamic simulations to examine the effects of tidal stripping on cold dark matter (CDM) sub haloes that host three of the most luminous Milky Way (MW) dwarf satellite galaxies: Fornax, Sculptor, and Leo I. We identify simulated satellites that match the observed spatial and kinematic distributions of stars in these galaxies, and track their evolution after infall. We find $\sim$ 30$\%$ of subhaloes hosting satellites with present-day stellar mass $10^6$-$10^8$ $M_{\odot}$ experience $>20\%$ stellar mass loss after infall. Fornax analogues have earlier infal…
Recent studies emphasize that an empirical relation between the stellar mass of galaxies and the mass of their host dark matter subhaloes can predict the clustering of galaxies and its evolution with cosmic time. In this paper we study the assumptions made by this methodology using a semi-analytical model (SAM). To this end, we randomly swap between the locations of model galaxies within a narrow range of subhalo mass (M_infall). We find that shuffled samples of galaxies have different auto-correlation functions in comparison with the original model galaxies. This difference is significant eve…
In this paper, in the framework of the secondary infall model, the correlation between the central surface density and the halo core radius of galaxy, and cluster of galaxies, dark matter haloes was analyzed, this having recently been studied on a wide range of scales. We used Del Popolo (2009) secondary infall model taking into account ordered and random angular momentum, dynamical friction, and dark matter (DM) adiabatic contraction to calculate the density profile of haloes, and then these profiles are used to determine the surface density of DM haloes. The main result is that $r_\ast$ (the…
The splashback radius, $R_{\rm sp}$, is a physically motivated halo boundary that separates infalling and collapsed matter of haloes. We study $R_{\rm sp}$ in the hydrodynamic and dark matter only IllustrisTNG simulations. The most commonly adopted signature of $R_{\rm sp}$ is the radius at which the radial density profiles are steepest. Therefore, we explicitly optimise our density profile fit to the profile slope and find that this leads to a $\sim5\%$ larger radius compared to other optimisations. We calculate $R_{\rm sp}$ for haloes with masses between $10^{13-15}{\rm M}_{\odot}$ as a func…
We quantify the relative importance of environmental quenching versus pre-processing in $z\sim1$ clusters by analysing the infalling galaxy population in the outskirts of 15 galaxy clusters at $0.8<z<1.4$ drawn from the GOGREEN and GCLASS surveys. We find significant differences between the infalling galaxies and a control sample; in particular, an excess of massive quiescent galaxies in the infalling region. These massive infalling galaxies likely reside in larger dark matter haloes than similar-mass control galaxies because they have twice as many satellite galaxies. Furthermore, these satel…
We apply the empirical method built for z=0 in the previous work of Wang et al. to a higher redshift, to link galaxy stellar mass directly with its hosting dark matter halo mass at z~0.8. The relation of the galaxy stellar mass and the host halo mass M_infall is constrained by fitting both the stellar mass function and the correlation functions at different stellar mass intervals of the VVDS observation, where M_infall is the mass of the hosting halo at the time when the galaxy was last the central galaxy. We find that for low mass haloes, their residing central galaxies are less massive at hi…
N-body simulations suggest that the substructures that survive inside dark matter haloes follow universal distributions in mass and radial number density. We demonstrate that a simple analytical model can explain these subhalo distributions as resulting from tidal stripping which increasingly reduces the mass of subhaloes with decreasing halo-centric distance. As a starting point, the spatial distribution of subhaloes of any given infall mass is shown to be largely indistinguishable from the overall mass distribution of the host halo. Using a physically motivated statistical description of the…
We use the Illustris Simulations to gain insight into the build-up of the outer, low-surface brightness regions which surround galaxies. We characterize the stellar haloes by means of the logarithmic slope of the spherically-averaged stellar density profiles, alphaSTARS at z=0, and we relate these slopes to the properties of the underlying Dark-Matter (DM) haloes, their central galaxies, and their assembly histories. We analyze a sample of ~5,000 galaxies resolved with more than 5x10^4 particles each, and spanning a variety of morphologies and halo masses (3x10^11 < Mvir < 10^14 Msun). We find…
Dark matter haloes have long been recognized as one of the fundamental building blocks of large scale structure formation models. Despite their importance -- or perhaps because of it! -- halo definitions continue to evolve towards more physically motivated criteria. Here, we propose a new definition that is physically motivated, and effectively unique and parameter-free: ''A dark matter halo is comprised of the collection of particles orbiting in their own self-generated potential.'' This definition is enabled by the fact that, even with as few as $\approx 300$ particles per halo, nearly every…
We present six simulations of galactic stellar haloes formed by the tidal disruption of accreted dwarf galaxies in a fully cosmological setting. Our model is based on the Aquarius project, a suite of high resolution N-body simulations of individual dark matter haloes. We tag subsets of particles in these simulations with stellar populations predicted by the Galform semi-analytic model. Our method self-consistently tracks the dynamical evolution and disruption of satellites from high redshift. The luminosity function and structural properties of surviving satellites, which agree well with obser…
Galaxy and Halo Root Systems: Fingerprints of Mass Assembly
Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaiì at Mānoa(夏威夷大学马诺阿分校天文学研究所);Blue Marble Space(蓝大理石空间);UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Astronomía(墨西哥国立自治大学天文学研究所)
We use the high resolution cosmological N-body simulations from the Aquarius project to investigate in detail the mechanisms that determine the shape of Milky Way-type dark matter haloes. We find that, when measured at the instantaneous virial radius, the shape of individual haloes changes with time, evolving from a typically prolate configuration at early stages to a more triaxial/oblate geometry at the present day. This evolution in halo shape correlates well with the distribution of the infalling material: prolate configurations arise when haloes are fed through narrow filaments, which char…
In the present paper, we improve the "Extended Secondary Infall Model" (ESIM) of Williams et al. (2004) to obtain further insights on the cusp/core problem. The model takes into account the effect of ordered and random angular momentum, dynamical friction and baryon adiabatic contraction in order to obtain a secondary infall model more close to the collapse reality. The model is applied to structures on galactic scales (normal and dwarf spiral galaxies) and on cluster of galaxies scales. The results obtained suggest that angular momentum and dynamical friction are able, on galactic scales, to …
The density profiles of dark matter haloes contain rich information about their growth history and physical properties. One particularly interesting region is the splashback radius, $R_{\rm sp}$, which marks the transition between particles orbiting in the halo and particles undergoing first infall. While the dependence of $R_{\rm sp}$ on the recent accretion rate is well established and theoretically expected, it is not clear exactly what parts of the accretion history $R_{\rm sp}$ responds to, and what other halo properties might additionally influence its position. We comprehensively invest…
We introduce an extension of the ELVIS project to account for the effects of the Milky Way galaxy on its subhalo population. Our simulation suite, Phat ELVIS, consists of twelve high-resolution cosmological dark matter-only (DMO) zoom simulations of Milky Way-size $Λ$CDM~ haloes ($M_{\rm v} = 0.7-2 \times 10^{12} \,\mathrm{M}_\odot$) along with twelve re-runs with embedded galaxy potentials grown to match the observed Milky Way disk and bulge today. The central galaxy potential destroys subhalos on orbits with small pericenters in every halo, regardless of the ratio of galaxy mass to halo mass…
We present the first comprehensive analysis of the segregation of dark matter subhaloes in their host haloes. Using numerical simulations, we examine the segregation of twelve different subhalo properties with respect to both orbital energy and halo-centric radius (in real space as well as in projection). Subhaloes are strongly segregated by accretion redshift, which is an outcome of the inside-out assembly of their host haloes. Since subhaloes that were accreted earlier have experienced more tidal stripping, subhaloes that have lost a larger fraction of their mass at infall are on more bound …
The origins of the ~10^9 Msun quasar supermassive black holes (BHs) at redshifts z > 6 remain a theoretical puzzle. One possibility is that they grew from ~10^5 Msun BHs formed in the 'direct collapse' of pristine, atomic-cooling (temperatures T ~ 8000 K; PAC) gas that did not fragment to form ordinary stars due to a lack of molecular hydrogen and metals. We propose that baryonic streaming---the relic relative motion of gas with respect to dark matter from cosmological recombination---provides a natural mechanism for establishing the conditions necessary for direct collapse. This effect delays…
Associating the formation sites of haloes with the maxima of the smoothed linear density field, we present non-perturbative predictions for the Lagrangian and evolved halo correlation functions that are valid at all separations. In Lagrangian space, we find significant deviations from the perturbative bias calculation at small scales, in particular, a pronounced exclusion region where $ξ=-1$ for maxima of unequal height. Our predictions are in good agreement with the Lagrangian clustering of dark matter proto-haloes reconstructed from N-body simulations. Our predictions for the mean infall and…
We use simulations of Milky Way-sized dark matter haloes from the Aquarius Project to investigate the orbits of substructure haloes likely, according to a semi-analytic galaxy formation model, to host luminous satellites. These tend to populate the most massive subhaloes and are on more radial orbits than the majority of subhaloes found within the halo virial radius. One reason for this (mild) kinematic bias is that many low-mass subhaloes have apocentres that exceed the virial radius of the main host; they are thus excluded from subhalo samples identified within the virial boundary, reducing …
We use a 64$h^{-1}$Mpc dark matter (DM) only cosmological simulation to examine the large scale orientation of haloes and substructures with respect the cosmic web. A web classification scheme based on the velocity shear tensor is used to assign to each halo in the simulation a web type: knot, filament, sheet or void. Using $\sim10^6$ haloes that span ~3 orders of magnitude in mass the orientation of the halo's spin and the orbital angular momentum of subhaloes with respect to the eigenvectors of the shear tensor is examined. We find that the orbital angular momentum of subhaloes tends to alig…
The clustering of dark matter haloes with fixed mass depends on their formation history, an effect known as assembly bias. We use zoom N -body simulations to investigate the origin of this phenomenon. For each halo at redshift z=0, we determine the time in which the physical volume containing its final mass becomes stable. We consider five examples for which this happens at z~1.5 and two that do not stabilize by z=0. The zoom simulations show that early-collapsing haloes do not grow in mass at z=0 while late-forming ones show a net inflow. The reason is that 'accreting' haloes are located at t…
We use two simulations performed within the Constrained Local UniversE Simulation (CLUES) project to study both the shape and radial alignment of (the dark matter component of) subhaloes; one of the simulations is a dark matter only model while the other run includes all the relevant gas physics and star formation recipes. We find that the involvement of gas physics does not have a statistically significant effect on either property -- at least not for the most massive subhaloes considered in this study. However, we observe in both simulations including and excluding gasdynamics a (pronounced)…
We study the properties of gas inside and around galaxy haloes as a function of radius and halo mass, focussing mostly on z=2, but also showing some results for z=0. For this purpose, we use a suite of large cosmological, hydrodynamical simulations from the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations project. The properties of cold- and hot-mode gas, which we separate depending on whether the temperature has been higher than 10^5.5 K while it was extragalactic, are clearly distinguishable in the outer parts of massive haloes (virial temperatures >> 10^5 K. The differences between cold- and hot-mode gas r…
We use a simulation performed within the Constrained Local UniversE Simulation (CLUES) project to study a realistic Local Group-like object. We employ this group as a numerical laboratory for studying the evolution of the population of its subhaloes from the point of view of the effects it may have on the origin of different types of dwarf galaxies. We focus on the processes of tidal stripping of the satellites, their interaction, merging and grouping before infall. The tidal stripping manifests itself in the transition between the phase of mass accretion and mass loss seen in most subhaloes, …
(Abridged) We study the phase-space distribution of satellite galaxies associated with late-type galaxies in the GIMIC suite of simulations. GIMIC consists of re-simulations of 5 cosmologically representative regions from the Millennium simulation, which have higher resolution and incorporate baryonic physics. Whilst the disc of the galaxy is well aligned with the inner regions (r ~ 0.1r_200) of the dark matter halo, both in shape and angular momentum, there can be substantial misalignments at larger radii (r ~ r_200). Misalignments of > 45 deg are seen in ~ 30% of our sample. We find that the…
Which filaments matter: the relative scalings of anisotropic infall
Pusan National University(釜山国立大学);Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA)(中央研究院天文及天文物理研究所);University of Alberta(阿尔伯塔大学);Kyung Hee University(庆熙大学);Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris(巴黎天体物理研究所)
It has been shown some years ago that dark matter haloes outskirts are characterized by very steep density profiles in a very small radial range. This feature has been interpreted as a pile up of at a similar location of different particle orbits, namely splashback material at half an orbit after collapse. Adhikari et al. (2014), obtained the location of the splashback radius through a very simple model, namely calculating a dark matter shell trajectory in the secondary infall model while it crosses a growing, NFW profile shaped, dark matter halo. Since they imposed a halo profile instead of c…
We study the cusp/core problem using a secondary infall model (SIM) that takes into account the effect of ordered and random angular momentum, dynamical friction and baryons adiabatic contraction. The model is applied to structures on galactic scales (normal and dwarfs spiral galaxies) and on clusters of galaxies scales. Our analysis suggest that angular momentum and dynamical friction are able, on galactic scales, to overcome the competing effect of adiabatic contraction eliminating the cusp. The slope of density profile of inner haloes flattens with decreasing halo mass and the profile is we…
In the hierarchical formation model, galaxy clusters grow by accretion of smaller groups or isolated galaxies. During the infall into the centre of a cluster, the properties of accreted galaxies change. In particular, both observations and numerical simulations suggest that its dark matter halo is stripped by the tidal forces of the host. We use galaxy-galaxy weak lensing to measure the average mass of dark matter haloes of satellite galaxies as a function of projected distance to the centre of the host, for different stellar mass bins. Assuming that the stellar component of the galaxy is less…
Infrared modifications of General Relativity (GR) can be revealed by comparing the mass of galaxy clusters estimated from weak lensing to that from infall kinematics. We measure the 2D galaxy velocity distribution in the cluster infall region by applying the galaxy infall kinematics (GIK) model developed by Zu and Weinberg (2013) to two suites of f(R) and Galileon modified gravity simulations. Despite having distinct screening mechanisms, namely, the Chameleon and the Vainshtein effects, the f(R) and Galileon clusters exhibit very similar deviations in their GIK profiles from GR, with ~ 100-20…
(Abridged) Our aim is to investigate whether the presence of baryons can have any significant influence on the properties of the local Hubble flow which has proved to be "cold". We use two cosmological zoom simulations in the standard LCDM cosmology with the same set of initial conditions to study the formation of a local group-like system within a sphere of ~7 Mpc/h. The first one is a pure dark matter simulation (runDM) while a complete treatment of the physics of baryons is introduced in the second one (runB). We found that galaxies identified in runB and their corresponding dark matter hal…
The stellar haloes of galaxies can currently be studied either through observations of resolved halo stars or through surface photometry. Curiously, the two methods appear to give conflicting results, as a number of surface photometry measurements have revealed integrated colours that are too red to be reconciled with the halo properties inferred from the study of resolved stars. Several explanations for this anomaly have been proposed - including dust photoluminescence, extinction of extragalactic background light and a bottom-heavy stellar initial mass function. A decisive test is, however, …
We use the Millennium I and II cosmological simulations to revisit the impact of mergers in the growth of bulges in central galaxies in the LCDM scenario. We seed galaxies within the growing CDM haloes using semi-empirical relations to assign stellar and gaseous masses, and an analytic treatment to estimate the transfer of stellar mass to the bulge of the remnant after a galaxy merger. We find that this model roughly reproduces the observed correlation between the bulge-to-total (B/T) mass ratio and stellar mass in present-day central galaxies as well as their observed demographics, although l…
Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik(马克斯·普朗克天体物理研究所);Indian Institute of Science Education and Research(印度科学教育与研究学院);University of Chicago(芝加哥大学);Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago(芝加哥大学卡夫利宇宙物理研究所);Stanford University(斯坦福大学);SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(SLAC国家加速器实验室)
The mass distribution of dark matter haloes is the result of the hierarchical growth of initial density perturbations through mass accretion and mergers. We use an interpretable machine-learning framework to provide physical insights into the origin of the spherically-averaged mass profile of dark matter haloes. We train a gradient-boosted-trees algorithm to predict the final mass profiles of cluster-sized haloes, and measure the importance of the different inputs provided to the algorithm. We find two primary scales in the initial conditions (ICs) that impact the final mass profile: the densi…
Satellite galaxies undergo a variety of physical processes when they are accreted by groups and clusters, often resulting in the loss of baryonic and dark matter (DM) mass. In this work, we evaluate the predictions from the IllustrisTNG hydrodynamical simulation regarding the evolution of the matter content of satellites, focusing on a population that are accreted at $z>1$ and retain their identity as satellites down to $z=0$. At fixed host halo mass, the amount of DM and stellar mass stripped depends mostly on the pericentric distance, $d_{\rm peri}$, here normalised by host halo virial radiu…
We derive the density profile for collisionless dissipationless dark matter haloes in hierarchical cosmologies making use of the Secondary Infall (SI) model. The novelties are: i) we deal with triaxial virialised objects; ii) their seeds in the linear regime are peaks endowed with {\it unconvolved} spherically averaged density profiles according to the peak formalism; iii) the initial peculiar velocities are taken into account; and iv) accreting haloes are assumed to develop from the inside out, keeping the instantaneous inner system unaltered. The validity of this latter assumption is accurat…
Satellite galaxies in galaxy clusters represent a significant fraction of the global galaxy population. Because of the unusual dense environment of clusters, their evolution is driven by different mechanisms than the ones affecting field or central galaxies. Understanding the different interactions they are subject to, and how they are influenced by them, is therefore an important step towards explaining the global picture of galaxy evolution. In this paper, we use the publicly-available high resolution hydrodynamical simulation Illustris-1 to study satellite galaxies in the three most massive…
Theoretical $Λ$CDM cosmological models predict a much larger number of low mass dark matter haloes than has been observed in the Local Group of galaxies. One possible explanation is the increased difficulty of detecting these haloes if most of the visible matter is lost at early evolutionary phases through galactic winds. In this work we study the current models of triggering galactic winds in dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSph) from supernovae, and study, based on 3D hydrodynamic numerical simulations, the correlation of the mass loss rates and important physical parameters as the dark matter ha…
Scalar Field Dark Matter (SFDM) comprised of ultralight ($\gtrsim 10^{-22}$ eV) bosons is an alternative to standard, collisionless Cold Dark Matter (CDM) that is CDM-like on large scales but inhibits small-scale structure formation. As a Bose-Einstein condensate, its free-field ("fuzzy") limit (FDM) suppresses structure below the de Broglie wavelength, $λ_\text{deB}$, creating virialized haloes with central cores of radius $\simλ_\text{deB}$, surrounded by CDM-like envelopes, and a halo mass function (HMF) with a sharp cut-off on small scales. With a strong enough repulsive self-interaction (…
We carry out fully 3-dimensional simulations of evolution from self-similar, spherically symmetric linear perturbations of a Cold Dark Matter dominated Einstein-de Sitter universe. As a result of the radial orbit instability, the haloes which grow from such initial conditions are triaxial with major-to-minor axis ratios of order 3:1. They nevertheless grow approximately self-similarly in time. In all cases they have power-law density profiles and near-constant velocity anisotropy in their inner regions. Both the power-law index and the value of the velocity anisotropy depend on the similarity …
The infall regions of galaxy clusters represent the largest gravitationally bound structures in a $Λ$CDM universe. Measuring cluster mass profiles into the infall regions provides an estimate of the ultimate mass of these haloes. We use the caustic technique to measure cluster mass profiles from galaxy redshifts obtained with the Hectospec Cluster Survey (HeCS), an extensive spectroscopic survey of galaxy clusters with MMT/Hectospec. We survey 58 clusters selected by X-ray flux at 0.1$<$$z$$<$0.3. The survey includes 21,314 unique MMT/Hectospec redshifts for individual galaxies; 10,275 of thes…
We compare state-of-the-art semi-analytic models of galaxy formation as well as advanced sub-halo abundance matching models with a large sample of early-type galaxies from SDSS at z < 0.3. We focus our attention on the dependence of median sizes of central galaxies on host halo mass. The data do not show any difference in the structural properties of early-type galaxies with environment, at fixed stellar mass. All hierarchical models considered in this work instead tend to predict a moderate to strong environmental dependence, with the median size increasing by a factor of about 1.5-3 when mov…
The splashback radius $r_\text{sp}$ separates the physical regimes of collapsed and infalling material around massive dark matter haloes. In cosmological simulations, this location is associated with a steepening of the spherically averaged density profile $ρ(r)$. In this work, we measure the splashback feature in the stacked weak gravitational lensing signal of $27$ massive clusters from the Cluster Canadian Comparison Project with careful control of residual systematics effects. We find that the shear introduced by the presence of additional structure along the line of sight significantly af…
We combine the detailed Star Formation Histories of the Fornax and Sculptor dwarf Spheroidals with the Mass Assembly History of their dark matter (DM) halo progenitors to estimate if the energy deposited by Supernova type II (SNeII) is sufficient to create a substantial DM core. Assuming the efficiency of energy injection of the SNeII into DM particles is $ε_{\rm gc}=0.05$, we find that a single early episode, $z \gtrsim z_{\rm infall}$, that combines the energy of all SNeII due to explode over 0.5 Gyr, is sufficient to create a core of several hundred parsecs in both Sculptor and Fornax. Ther…
Galaxy surveys have shown that luminous galaxies are mainly distributed in large filaments and galaxy clusters. The remaining large volumes are virtually devoid of luminous galaxies. This is in concordance with the formation of the large-scale structure in Universe as derived from cosmological simulations. However, the numerical results indicate that cosmological voids are abundantly populated with dark matter haloes which may in principle host dwarf galaxies. Observational efforts have in contrast revealed, that voids are apparently devoid of dwarf galaxies. We investigate the formation of dw…
We measure the dark matter halo masses of z~2.36 UV color-selected star-forming galaxies by matching the observed median HI Lyα absorption around them, as observed in the spectra of background QSOs, to the absorption around haloes above a given mass in cosmological simulations. Focusing on transverse separations 0-2 pMpc and line of sight separations 154-616 km/s, we find a minimum halo mass of log10(Mmin/Msun)=11.6(+0.2)(-0.2), which is in good agreement with published halo mass estimates from clustering analyses. We verified that the measured halo mass is insensitive to a change in the cosmo…