The cold dark matter (CDM) scenario predicts that galactic halos should host a huge amount of subhalos possibly lighter than planets, depending on the nature of dark matter. Predicting their abundance and distribution has important implications for dark matter searches and searches for subhalos themselves, as they could provide a decisive test of the CDM paradigm. A major difficulty in subhalo population model building is to account for the gravitational stripping induced by baryons, which strongly impact on the overall dynamics inside galaxies. In this paper, we focus on these "baryonic" tides from analytical perspectives, summarizing previous work on galactic disk shocking, and thoroughly revisiting the impact of individual encounters with stars. For the latter, we go beyond the reference calculation of Gerhard and Fall (1983) to deal with penetrative encounters, and provide new analytical results. Based upon a full statistical analysis of subhalo energy change during multiple stellar encounters possibly occurring during disk crossing, we show that subhalos lighter than $\sim 1$~M$_\odot$ are very efficiently pruned by stellar encounters. This modifies their mass function in a stellar environment. In contrast, disk shocking is more efficient at pruning massive subhalos. In short, if reasonably resilient, subhalos surviving disk crossing have lost all their mass but an inner cuspy part, with a tidal mass function strongly departing from the cosmological one. If fragile, stellar encounters make their number density drop by an additional order of magnitude with respect to disk-shocking effects only (e.g., at the solar position in the Milky Way). Our results can be incorporated to any analytical or numerical subhalo population model, as we show for illustration. This study complements those based on cosmological simulations, which cannot resolve dark matter subhalos on such small scales.
When dark matter halos are accreted by massive host clusters, strong gravitational tidal forces begin stripping mass from the accreted subhalos. This stripping eventually removes all mass beyond a subhalo's tidal radius, but the unbound mass remains in the vicinity of the satellite for at least a dynamical time t_dyn. The N-body subhalo study of Chamberlain et al. verified this picture and pointed out a useful observational consequence: measurements of subhalo correlations beyond the tidal radius are sensitive to the infall time, t_infall, of the subhalo onto its host. We perform this cross-co…
The demographics of dark matter substructure depend sensitively on the nature of dark matter. Optimally leveraging this probe requires accurate theoretical predictions regarding the abundance of subhaloes. These predictions are hampered by artificial disruption in numerical simulations, by large halo-to-halo variance, and by the fact that the results depend on the baryonic physics of galaxy formation. In particular, numerical simulations have shown that the formation of a central disc can drastically reduce the abundance of substructure compared to a dark matter-only simulation, which has been…
Using an analytical model, we study the evolution of subhalo, including its mass, angular momentum and merging time-scale. This model considers the dominant processes governing subhalo evolution, such as dynamical friction, tidal stripping and tidal heating. We find that in order to best match the evolution of angular momentum measured from N-body simulation, mass stripping by tidal force should become inefficient after subhalo has experienced a few passages of pericenter. It is also found that the often used Coulomb logarithm $\ln M/m$ has to be revised to best fit the merging time-scales fro…
We introduce a Local Background Environment (LBE) estimator that can be measured in and around every galaxy or its dark matter subhalo in high-resolution cosmological simulations. The LBE is designed to capture the influence of environmental effects such as ram-pressure stripping on the formation and evolution of galaxies in semi-analytical models. We define the LBE directly from the particle data within an adaptive spherical shell, and devise a Gaussian mixture estimator to separate background particles from previously unidentified subhalo particles. Analyzing the LBE properties, we find that…
Any successful model of dark matter must explain the diversity of observed Milky Way (MW) satellite density profiles, from very dense ultrafaints to large, low density satellites such as Crater~II that appear to be larger their anticipated host dark matter haloes. We consider cold dark matter (CDM), warm dark matter (WDM, 3.3keV thermal relic power spectrum), and a self-interacting dark matter model (SIDM) that induces gravothermal collapse in low mass subhaloes. Predictions for these density profiles are complicated by the limitations of simulation resolution in the stripping of subhaloes by …
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 …
Accurately predicting the abundance and structural evolution of dark matter subhaloes is crucial for understanding galaxy formation, modeling galaxy clustering, and constraining the nature of dark matter. Due to the nonlinear nature of subhalo evolution, cosmological $N$-body simulations remain its primary method of investigation. However, it has recently been demonstrated that such simulations are still heavily impacted by artificial disruption, diminishing the information content on small scales and reducing the reliability of all simulation-calibrated semi-analytical models. In this paper, …
We present a model for the remnants of haloes that have gone through an adiabatic tidal stripping process. We show that this model exactly reproduces the remnant of an NFW halo that is exposed to a slowly increasing isotropic tidal field and approximately for an anisotropic tidal field. The model can be used to predict the asymptotic mass loss limit for orbiting subhaloes, solely as a function of the initial structure of the subhalo and the value of the tidal field at pericentre. Predictions can easily be made for differently concentrated host-haloes with and without baryonic components, which…
We study evolution of single subhaloes with their masses of $\sim10^9 M_\odot$ in a Milky-Way-sized host halo for self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) models. We perform dark-matter-only N-body simulations of dynamical evolution of individual subhaloes orbiting its host by varying self-scattering cross sections (including a velocity-dependent scenario), subhalo orbits, and internal properties of the subhalo. We calibrate a gravothermal fluid model to predict time evolution in spherical mass density profiles of isolated SIDM haloes with the simulations. We find that tidal effects of SIDM subhalo…
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…
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 study tidal stripping of fuzzy dark matter (FDM) subhalo cores using simulations of the Schrödinger-Poisson equations and analyze the dynamics of tidal disruption, highlighting the differences with standard cold dark matter. Mass loss outside of the tidal radius forces the core to relax into a less compact configuration, lowering the tidal radius. As the characteristic radius of a solitonic core scales inversely with its mass, tidal stripping results in a runaway effect and rapid tidal disruption of the core once its central density drops below $4.5$ times the average density of the host wi…
Accurately predicting the demographics of dark matter (DM) substructure is of paramount importance for many fields of astrophysics, including gravitational lensing, galaxy evolution, halo occupation modeling, and constraining the nature of dark matter. Because of its strongly non-linear nature, DM substructure is typically modeled using N-body simulations, which reveal that large fractions of DM subhaloes undergo complete disruption. In this paper we use both analytical estimates and idealized numerical simulations to investigate whether this disruption is mainly physical, due to tidal heating…
A defining prediction of the cold dark matter (CDM) cosmological model is the existence of a very large population of low mass haloes, down to planet-size masses. However, their fate as they are accreted onto haloes many orders of magnitude more massive remains fundamentally uncertain. A number of numerical explorations have found subhaloes to be very resilient to tides, but resolution limits make it difficult to explore tidal evolution at arbitrarily low masses. What are the structural properties of heavily stripped subhaloes? Do tidal effects destroy low-mass CDM subhaloes? Here we focus on …
It has been demonstrated that the inclusion of baryonic physics can alter the dark matter densities in the centers of low-mass galaxies, making the central dark matter slope more shallow than predicted in pure cold dark matter simulations. This flattening of the dark matter profile can occur in the most luminous subhalos around Milky Way-mass galaxies. Zolotov et al. (2012) have suggested a correction to be applied to the central masses of dark matter-only satellites in order to mimic the affect of (1) the flattening of the dark matter cusp due to supernova feedback in luminous satellites, and…
Measuring satellite galaxy subhalo masses in redMaPPer clusters with UNIONS weak lensing data
University of Waterloo(滑铁卢大学);McGill University(麦吉尔大学);Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics, University of Waterloo(滑铁卢大学天体物理中心);Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics(基础理论物理研究所);Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii(夏威夷大学天文研究所);NRC Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics(NRC赫茨伯格天文学与天体物理学研究所);Université Paris Cité(巴黎西岱大学);Université Paris-Saclay(巴黎萨克雷大学);CEA(法国原子能和替代能源委员会);CNRS(法国国家科学研究中心);AIM(天体物理学、物质与宇宙研究所);Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学)
Tunneling and tidal stripping in multifield ultralight dark matter halos
Center for Theoretical Physics—a Leinweber Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology(麻省理工学院莱因韦伯理论物理中心);Department of Physics, Harvard University(哈佛大学物理系);Universidad Autonoma de Madrid(马德里自治大学);IFT-UAM/CSIC(乌阿姆/西班牙国家科学研究委员会理论物理研究所)
Several recent studies have indicated that artificial subhalo disruption (the spontaneous, non-physical disintegration of a subhalo) remains prevalent in state-of-the-art dark matter-only cosmological simulations. In order to quantify the impact of disruption on the inferred subhalo demographics, we augment the semi-analytical SatGen dynamical subhalo evolution model with an improved treatment of tidal stripping that is calibrated using the DASH database of idealized high-resolution simulations of subhalo evolution, which are free from artificial disruption. We also develop a model of artifici…
Accurate models of the structural evolution of dark matter subhaloes, as they orbit within larger systems, are fundamental to understanding the detailed distribution of dark matter at the present day. Numerical simulations of subhalo evolution support the idea that the mass loss associated with tidal stripping is most naturally understood in energy space, with the particles that are the least bound being removed first. Starting from this premise, we recently proposed a zero-parameter "energy-truncation model" for subhalo evolution. We tested this model with simulations of tidal stripping of sa…
We explore the impact of elastic, anisotropic, velocity-dependent dark matter (DM) self-interactions on the host halo and subhalos of Milky Way (MW)--mass systems. We consider a generic self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) model parameterized by the masses of a light mediator and the DM particle. The ratio of these masses, $w$, sets the velocity scale above which momentum transfer due to DM self-interactions becomes inefficient. We perform high-resolution zoom-in simulations of an MW-mass halo for values of $w$ that span scenarios in which self-interactions either between the host and its subha…
Dynamical evolution of dark matter subhaloes in the Milky Way: role of the Galactic disc
Institute for Astronomy, School of Physics, Zhejiang University(浙江大学物理学院天体物理研究所);Center for Cosmology and Computational Astrophysics, Zhejiang University(浙江大学宇宙学与计算天体物理中心);Institute for Astronomy, University of Vienna(维也纳大学天体物理研究所)
New insights on low-mass dark matter subhalo tidal tracks via numerical simulations
Durham University(杜伦大学);Instituto de Física Teórica UAM-CSIC, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid(马德里自治大学-西班牙国家科学研究委员会理论物理研究所);Universidad Autónoma de Madrid(马德里自治大学);Zhejiang University(浙江大学)
Impact of baryons on the population of Galactic subhalos and implications for dark matter searches
University of Hamburg(汉堡大学);Instituto de Física Teórica UAM-CSIC, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid(马德里自治大学-西班牙国家研究委员会理论物理研究所);Universidad Autónoma de Madrid(马德里自治大学);Universidad de Valencia(瓦伦西亚大学);Durham University(杜伦大学)
We study the connection between the observed star formation rate-stellar mass (SFR-$M_*$) relation and the evolution of the stellar mass function (SMF) by means of a Subhalo Abundance Matching technique coupled to merger trees extracted from a N-body simulation. Our approach, which considers both galaxy mergers and stellar stripping, is to force the model to match the observed SMF at redshift $z>2$, and let it evolve down to the present time according to the observed (SFR-$M_*$) relation. In this study, we use two different sets of SMFs and two SFR-$M_*$ relations: a simple power law and a rel…
Motivated by a recently found interesting property of the dark halo surface density within a radius, $r_{\rm max}$, giving the maximum circular velocity, $V_{\rm max}$, we investigate it for dark halos of the Milky Way's and Andromeda's dwarf satellites based on cosmological simulations. We select and analyze the simulated subhalos associated with Milky Way-sized dark halos and find that the values of their surface densities, $Σ_{V_{\rm max}}$, are in good agreement with those for the observed dwarf spheroidal satellites even without employing any fitting procedures. This implies that this sur…
Cold dark matter subhalos are expected to populate galaxies in numbers. If dark matter self-annihilates, these objects turn into prime targets for indirect searches, in particular with gamma-ray telescopes. Incidentally, the Fermi-LAT catalog already contains many unidentified sources that might be associated with subhalos. In this paper, we determine the probability for subhalos to be identified as gamma-ray pointlike sources from their predicted distribution properties. We use a semi-analytical model for the Galactic subhalo population, which, in contrast to cosmological simulations, can be …
Semi-Analytic Modeling of Dark Matter Subhalo Encounters with Thin Stellar Streams: Statistical Predictions for GD-1-like Streams in CDM
C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stony Brook University(纽约州立大学石溪分校杨振宁理论物理研究所);Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine(加州大学尔湾分校物理与天文学系);Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute(平顿研究所计算天体物理学中心)
Survival of the most compact: the life and death of satellite halos in self-interacting dark matter
Goethe University(法兰克福歌德大学);Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC)(圣塞巴斯蒂安国际物理中心);Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München(慕尼黑路德维希-马克西米利安大学);Excellence Cluster ORIGINS(ORIGINS卓越集群);The University of Texas at Austin(得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校);University of California - Irvine(加州大学尔湾分校)
Previous studies have shown that dark matter deficient galaxies (DMDG) such as NGC1052-DF2 (hereafter DF2) can result from tidal stripping. An important question, though, is whether such a stripping scenario can explain DF2's large specific frequency of globular clusters (GCs). After all, tidal stripping and shocking preferentially remove matter from the outskirts. We examine this using idealized, high-resolution simulations of a regular dark matter dominated galaxy that is accreted onto a massive halo. As long as the initial (pre-infall) dark matter halo of the satellite is cored, which is co…
N-body dark matter simulations of structure formation in the $Λ$CDM model predict a population of subhalos within Galactic halos that have higher central densities than inferred for satellites of the Milky Way, a tension known as the `too big to fail' problem. Proposed solutions include baryonic effects, a smaller mass for the Milky Way halo, and warm dark matter. We test these three possibilities using a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation to generate luminosity functions for Milky Way halo-analogue satellite populations, the results of which are then coupled to the Jiang & van den Bosch …
We propose that the Ultra-Diffuse Galaxy (UDG) population represents a set of satellite galaxies born in $\sim10^{10}-10^{11}$ M$_\odot$ halos, similar to field dwarfs, which suffer a dramatic reduction in surface brightness due to tidal stripping and heating. This scenario is observationally motivated by the radial alignment of UDGs in Coma as well as the significant dependence of UDG abundance on cluster mass. As a test of this formation scenario, we apply a semi-analytic model describing the change in stellar mass and half-light radius of dwarf satellites, occupying either cored or cuspy ha…
The central density profiles in dwarf galaxy halos depend strongly on the nature of dark matter. Recently, in Malhan et al. (2021), we employed N-body simulations to show that the cuspy cold dark matter (CDM) subhalos predicted by cosmological simulations can be differentiated from cored subhalos using the properties of accreted globular cluster (GC) streams since these GCs experience tidal stripping within their parent halos prior to accretion onto the Milky Way. We previously found that clusters that are accreted within cuspy subhalos produce streams with larger physical widths and higher di…
We study the properties of distinct dark matter halos (i.e., those that are not subhalos) that have a final virial mass $M_{\mathrm{vir}}$ at $z = 0$ less than their peak mass ($M_{\mathrm{peak}}$) in the Bolshoi-Planck cosmological simulation. We identify two primary causes of halo mass loss: relaxation after a major merger and tidal stripping by a massive neighbouring halo. Major mergers initially boost $M_{\mathrm{vir}}$ and typically cause the final halo to become more prolate and less relaxed and to have higher spin and lower NFW concentration. As the halo relaxes, high energy material fr…
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…
Within the cosmological concordance model, Cold Dark Matter (CDM) subhalos form the building blocks which merge hierarchically to more massive galaxies. Since intergalactic gas is accreted by massive galaxies, observable e.g. as high- velocity clouds (HVCs) around the Milky Way, with extremely low metallicities, these can be suggested to represent the baryonic content of primordial Dark Matter (DM) subhalos. Another possibility of their origin is that they stem from disrupted satellite galaxies, but in this case, these gas clouds move unaccompanied by a bound DM structure. Since HVCs are obser…
The Sinking Statistics of Dark Matter Subhalos Across Hierarchical Levels
Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学);University of Pennsylvania(宾夕法尼亚大学);Leiden University(莱顿大学);Peking University(北京大学);Nanjing University(南京大学);Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院)
We measure the gravitational lensing signal around satellite galaxies in a sample of galaxy clusters at $z<0.15$ by combining high-quality imaging data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope with a large sample of spectroscopically-confirmed cluster members. We use extensive image simulations to assess the accuracy of shape measurements of faint, background sources in the vicinity of bright satellite galaxies. We find a small but significant bias, as light from the lenses makes the shapes of background galaxies appear radially aligned with the lens. We account for this bias by applying a corr…
We propose a novel method to select satellite galaxies in outer regions of galaxy groups or clusters using weak gravitational lensing. The method is based on the theoretical expectation that the tangential shear pattern around satellite galaxies would appear with negative values at an offset distance from the center of the main halo. We can thus locate the satellite galaxies statistically with an offset distance of several lensing smoothing scales by using the standard reconstruction of surface mass density maps from weak lensing observation. We test the idea using high-resolution cosmological…
We investigate the effects of self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) on the tidal stripping and evaporation of satellite galaxies in a Milky Way-like host. We use a suite of five zoom-in, dark-matter-only simulations, two with velocity-independent SIDM cross sections, two with velocity-dependent SIDM cross sections, and one cold dark matter simulation for comparison. After carefully assigning stellar mass to satellites at infall, we find that stars are stripped at a higher rate in SIDM than in CDM. In contrast, the total bound dark matter mass loss rate is minimally affected, with subhalo evapora…
Which Milky Way Streams Make the Best Dark Matter Detectors?
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research(麻省理工学院卡弗里天体物理学与空间研究研究所);Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University(斯坦福大学卡弗里粒子天体物理学与宇宙学研究所);Department of Physics, Stanford University(斯坦福大学物理系);SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(斯坦福直线加速器国家实验室);The Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science(卡内基科学机构天文台);Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University(普林斯顿大学天体物理科学系)
The steepness of the central density profiles of dark matter (DM) in low-mass galaxy halos (e.g. dwarf galaxies) is a powerful probe of the nature of DM. We propose a novel scheme to probe the inner profiles of galaxy subhalos using stellar streams. We show that the present day morphological and dynamical properties of accreted globular cluster (GC) streams - those produced from tidal stripping of GCs that initially evolved within satellite galaxies and later merged with the Milky Way (MW) - are sensitive to the central DM density profile and mass of their parent satellites. GCs that accrete w…
The shape-velocity alignment of satellites forged by tidal locking and dynamical friction
Tsung-Dao Lee Institute & School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交大李政道研究所与物理与天文学院);Key Laboratory for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (MOE)/Shanghai Key Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology(粒子天体物理与宇宙学重点实验室(教育部)/上海粒子物理与宇宙学重点实验室);University of Toronto(多伦多大学);Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh(爱丁堡大学天体物理研究所);Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge(剑桥大学天体物理研究所);Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学)
We suggest a direct link between the two "missing" baryon problems of contemporary galaxy formation theory: (1) that large galaxies are known to contain too little gas and stars and (2) that too few dwarf satellite galaxies are observed around large galaxies compared with cosmological simulations. The former can be explained by invoking some energetic process -- most likely AGN or star formation feedback -- which expels to infinity a significant fraction of the gas initially present in the proto-galaxy, while the latter problem is usually explained by star formation feedback inside the dwarf o…
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…
We use cosmological N-body simulations from the Aquarius Project to study the tidal effects of a dark matter halo on the shape and orientation of its substructure. Although tides are often assumed to enhance asphericity and to stretch subhaloes tangentially, these effects are short lived: as in earlier work, we find that subhaloes affected by tides become substantially more spherical and show a strong radial alignment toward the centre of the host halo. These results, combined with a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation, may be used to assess the effect of Galactic tides on the observed pop…
The observed anti-correlation between the central dark matter (DM) densities of the bright Milky Way (MW) dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) and their orbital pericenter distances poses a potential signature of self-interacting dark matter (SIDM). In this work we investigate this possibility by analysing the range of SIDM scattering cross section per unit mass, $σ/m_χ$, able to explain such anti-correlation. We simulate the orbital evolution of dSphs subhaloes around the MW assuming an analytical form for the gravitational potential, adopting the proper motions from the Gaia mission and includi…