No Arabic abstract
Using spectral methods, we analyse the orbital structure of prolate/triaxial dark matter (DM) halos in N-body simulations to understand the processes that drive the evolution of shapes of DM halos and elliptical galaxies in which central masses are grown. A longstanding issue is whether the change in the shapes of DM halos is the result of chaotic scattering of box orbits, or whether they change shape adiabatically in response to the evolving galactic potential. We use orbital frequencies to classify orbits, to quantify orbital shapes, and to identify resonant orbits and chaotic orbits. The frequency-based method overcomes the limitations of Lyapunov exponents which are sensitive to numerical discreteness effects. Regardless of the distribution of the baryonic component, the shape of a DM halo changes primarily due to changes in the shapes of individual orbits within a given family. Orbits with small pericentric radii are more likely to change both their orbital type and shape than orbits with large pericentric radii. Whether the evolution is regular (and reversible) or chaotic (and irreversible), depends primarily on the radial distribution of the baryonic component. The growth of an extended baryonic component of any shape results in a regular rather than chaotic change in orbital populations. In contrast the growth of a massive and compact central component results in chaotic scattering of a significant fraction of both box and long-axis tube orbits. The growth of a disk causes a significant fraction of halo particles to become trapped by major global orbital resonances. Despite the fact that shape of a DM halo is always quite oblate following the growth of a central baryonic component, a significant fraction of its orbit population has characteristics of its triaxial or prolate progenitor (ABRIDGED).
We consider a dark matter halo (DMH) of a spherical galaxy as a Bose-Einstein condensate of the ultra-light axions interacting with the baryonic matter. In the mean-field limit, we have derived the integro-differential equation of the Hartree-Fock type for the spherically symmetrical wave function of the DMH component. This equation includes two independent dimensionless parameters: (i) b{eta}- the ratio of baryon and axion total mases and (ii) {xi}- the ratio of characteristic baryon and axion spatial parameters. We extended our dissipation algorithm for studying numerically the ground state of the axion halo in the gravitational field produced by the baryonic component. We calculated the characteristic size, Xc, of DMH as a function of b{eta} and {xi} and obtained an analytical approximation for Xc.
We study the behaviors of galactic disks in triaxial halos both numerically and analytically to see if warps can be excited and sustained in triaxial potentials. We consider the following two scenarios: 1) galactic disks that are initially tilted relative to the equatorial plane of the halo (for a pedagogical purpose), and 2) tilted infall of dark matter relative to the equatorial plane of the disk and the halo. With numerical simulations of 100,000 disk particles in a fixed halo potential, we find that in triaxial halos, warps can be excited and sustained just as in spherical or axisymmetric halos but they show some oscillatory behaviors and even can be transformed to a polar-ring system if the halo has a prolate-like triaxiality. The non-axisymmetric component of the halo causes the disk to nutate, and the differential nutation between the inner and outer parts of the disk generally makes the magnitude of the warp slightly diminish and fluctuate. We also find that warps are relatively weaker in oblate and oblate-like triaxial halos, and since these halos are the halo configurations of disk galaxies inferred by cosmological simulations, our results are consistent with the fact that most of the observed warps are quite weak. We derive approximate formulae for the torques exerted on the disk by the triaxial halo and the dark matter torus, and with these formulae we successfully describe the behaviors of the disks in our simulations. The techniques used in deriving these formulae could be applied for realistic halos with more complex structures.
In a purely cold dark matter universe, the initial matter power spectrum and its subsequent gravitational growth contain no special mass- or time-scales, and so neither do the emergent population statistics of internal dark matter (DM) halo properties. Using 1.5 million halos from three IllustrisTNG realizations of a LambdaCDM universe, we show that galaxy formation physics drives non-monotonic features (wiggles) into DM property statistics across six decades in halo mass, from dwarf galaxies to galaxy clusters. We characterize these features by extracting the halo mass-dependent statistics of five DM halo properties -- velocity dispersion, NFW concentration, density- and velocity-space shapes, and formation time -- using kernel-localized linear regression (KLLR). Comparing precise estimates of normalizations, slopes, and covariances between realizations with and without galaxy formation, we find systematic deviations across all mass-scales, with maximum deviations of 25% at the Milky-Way mass of 1e12 Msun. The mass-dependence of the wiggles is set by the interplay between different cooling and feedback mechanisms, and we discuss its observational implications. The property covariances depend strongly on halo mass and physics treatment, but the correlations are mostly robust. Using multivariate KLLR and interpretable machine learning, we show the halo concentration and velocity-space shape are principal contributors, at different mass, to the velocity dispersion variance. Statistics of mass accretion rate and DM surface pressure energy are provided in an appendix. We publicly release halo property catalogs and KLLR parameters for the TNG runs at twenty epochs up to z = 12.
The cosmic baryonic fluid at low redshifts is similar to a fully developed turbulence. In this work, we use simulation samples produced by the hybrid cosmological hydrodynamical/N-body code, to investigate on what scale the deviation of spatial distributions between baryons and dark matter is caused by turbulence. For this purpose, we do not include the physical processes such as star formation, supernovae (SNe) and active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback into our code, so that the effect of turbulence heating for IGM can be exhibited to the most extent. By computing cross-correlation functions $r_m(k)$ for the density field and $r_v(k)$ for the velocity field of both baryons and dark matter, we find that deviations between the two matter components for both density field and velocity field, as expected, are scale-dependent. That is, the deviations are the most significant at small scales and gradually diminish on larger and larger scales. Also, the deviations are time-dependent, i.e. they become larger and larger with increasing cosmic time. The most emphasized result is that the spatial deviations between baryons and dark matter revealed by velocity field are more significant than that by density field. At z = 0, at the 1% level of deviation, the deviation scale is about 3.7 $h^{-1}$Mpc for density field, while as large as 23 $h^{-1}$Mpc for velocity field, a scale that falls within the weakly non-linear regime for the structure formation paradigm. Our results indicate that the effect of turbulence heating is indeed comparable to that of these processes such as SN and AGN feedback.
Cosmological simulations indicate that cold dark matter (CDM) halos should be triaxial. Verifying observationally this theoretical prediction is, however, less than straightforward because the assembly of galaxies is expected to modify the halo shapes and to render them more axisymmetric. We use a suite of N-body simulations to investigate quantitatively the effect of the growth of a central disk galaxy on the shape of triaxial dark matter halos. As expected, the halo responds to the presence of the disk by becoming more spherical. The net effect depends only weakly on the orientation of the disk relative to the halo principal axes or the timescale of disk assembly, but strongly on the overall gravitational importance of the disk. Our results show that exponential disks whose contribution peaks at less than ~50% of their circular velocity are unable to modify noticeably the shape of the gravitational potential of their surrounding halos. Many dwarf and low surface brightness galaxies are expected to be in this regime, and therefore their detailed kinematics could be used to probe halo triaxiality, one of the basic predictions of the CDM paradigm. We argue that the complex disk kinematics of the dwarf galaxy NGC 2976 might be the reflection of a triaxial halo. Such signatures of halo triaxiality should be common in galaxies where the luminous component is subdominant.