scholarly journals The lensing properties of subhaloes in massive elliptical galaxies in sterile neutrino cosmologies

2019 ◽  
Vol 491 (1) ◽  
pp. 1295-1310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Despali ◽  
Mark Lovell ◽  
Simona Vegetti ◽  
Robert A Crain ◽  
Benjamin D Oppenheimer

ABSTRACT We use high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations run with the EAGLE model of galaxy formation to study the differences between the properties of – and subsequently the lensing signal from – subhaloes of massive elliptical galaxies at redshift 0.2, in Cold and Sterile Neutrino (SN) Dark Matter models. We focus on the two 7 keV SN models that bracket the range of matter power spectra compatible with resonantly produced SN as the source of the observed 3.5 keV line. We derive an accurate parametrization for the subhalo mass function in these two SN models relative to cold dark matter (CDM), as well as the subhalo spatial distribution, density profile, and projected number density and the dark matter fraction in subhaloes. We create mock lensing maps from the simulated haloes to study the differences in the lensing signal in the framework of subhalo detection. We find that subhalo convergence is well described by a lognormal distribution and that signal of subhaloes in the power spectrum is lower in SN models with respect to CDM, at a level of 10–80 per cent, depending on the scale. However, the scatter between different projections is large and might make the use of power spectrum studies on the typical scales of current lensing images very difficult. Moreover, in the framework of individual detections through gravitational imaging a sample of ≃30 lenses with an average sensitivity of $M_{\rm {sub}} = 5 \times 10^{7}\, {\rm M}_{\odot}$ would be required to discriminate between CDM and the considered sterile neutrino models.

2021 ◽  
Vol 503 (4) ◽  
pp. 5638-5645
Author(s):  
Gábor Rácz ◽  
István Szapudi ◽  
István Csabai ◽  
László Dobos

ABSTRACT The classical gravitational force on a torus is anisotropic and always lower than Newton’s 1/r2 law. We demonstrate the effects of periodicity in dark matter only N-body simulations of spherical collapse and standard Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) initial conditions. Periodic boundary conditions cause an overall negative and anisotropic bias in cosmological simulations of cosmic structure formation. The lower amplitude of power spectra of small periodic simulations is a consequence of the missing large-scale modes and the equally important smaller periodic forces. The effect is most significant when the largest mildly non-linear scales are comparable to the linear size of the simulation box, as often is the case for high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations. Spherical collapse morphs into a shape similar to an octahedron. The anisotropic growth distorts the large-scale ΛCDM dark matter structures. We introduce the direction-dependent power spectrum invariant under the octahedral group of the simulation volume and show that the results break spherical symmetry.


2019 ◽  
Vol 485 (4) ◽  
pp. 5474-5489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark R Lovell ◽  
Jesús Zavala ◽  
Mark Vogelsberger

Abstract A cut-off in the linear matter power spectrum at dwarf galaxy scales has been shown to affect the abundance, formation mechanism and age of dwarf haloes, and their galaxies at high and low redshifts. We use hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation within the ETHOS framework in a benchmark model that has such a cut-off and that has been shown to be an alternative to the cold dark matter (CDM) model that alleviates its dwarf-scale challenges. We show how galaxies in this model form differently to CDM, on a halo-by-halo basis, at redshifts z ≥ 6. We show that when CDM haloes with masses around the ETHOS half-mode mass scale are resimulated with the ETHOS matter power spectrum, they form with 50 per cent less mass than their CDM counterparts due to their later formation times, yet they retain more of their gas reservoir due to the different behaviour of gas and dark matter during the monolithic collapse of the first haloes in models with a galactic-scale cut-off. As a result, galaxies in ETHOS haloes near the cut-off scale grow rapidly between z = 10 and 6 and by z = 6 end up having very similar stellar masses, higher gas fractions and higher star formation rates relative to their CDM counterparts. We highlight these differences by making predictions for how the number of galaxies with old stellar populations is suppressed in ETHOS for both z = 6 galaxies and for gas-poor Local Group fossil galaxies. Interestingly, we find an age gradient in ETHOS between galaxies that form in high- and low-density environments.


1987 ◽  
Vol 117 ◽  
pp. 367-367
Author(s):  
Rosemary F. G. Wyse ◽  
Bernard J. T. Jones

We present a simple model for the formation of elliptical galaxies, based on a binary clustering hierarchy of dark matter, the chemical enrichment of the gas at each level being controlled by supernovae. The initial conditions for the non-linear phases of galaxy formation are set by the post-recombination power spectrum of density fluctuations. We investigate two models for this power spectrum - the first is a straightforward power law, |δk|2 ∝ kn, and the second is Peeble's analytic approximation to the emergent spectrum in a universe dominated by cold dark matter. The normalisation is chosen such that on some scale, say M ∼ 1012M⊙, the objects that condense out have properties - radius and velocity dispersion - resembling ‘typical’ galaxies. There is some ambiguity in this due to the poorly determined mass-to-light ratio of a typical elliptical galaxy — we look at two normalisations, σ1D ∼ 350kms−1 and σ1D ∼ 140kms−1. The choice determines which of Compton cooling or hydrogen cooling is more important during the galaxy formation period. The non-linear behaviour of the perturbations is treated by the homogeneous sphere approximation.


1988 ◽  
Vol 130 ◽  
pp. 552-552
Author(s):  
A. F. Heavens ◽  
J. A. Peacock

We have calculated the growth of angular momentum about local density maxima at early epochs. We find that high peaks experience higher torques than low peaks, counteracting the short collapse time during which the high peaks can acquire angular momentum. Which effect is dominant depends on the perturbation power spectrum: for power spectra characteristic of both cold dark matter and hot dark matter, the effects nearly cancel, and the total angular momentum acquired by a collapsing object is almost independent of the height of the peak. Furthermore, the distributions of angular momenta acquired by collapsing protosystems are extremely broad, for all power spectra, far exceeding any modest differences between peaks of different height.These results indicate that it is not possible to account for the systematic differences in angular momentum properties of disk and elliptical galaxies simply by postulating that the latter arise from fluctuations of greater overdensity, contrary to some recent suggestions. The figure shows the probability distributions for the final angular momentum acquired by peaks of dimensionless height 1–4, for a power spectrum similar to cold dark matter. A fuller account of this work has been submitted to MNRAS.


2020 ◽  
Vol 498 (1) ◽  
pp. 702-717 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark R Lovell ◽  
Wojciech Hellwing ◽  
Aaron Ludlow ◽  
Jesús Zavala ◽  
Andrew Robertson ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT The nature of the dark matter can affect the collapse time of dark matter haloes, and can therefore be imprinted in observables such as the stellar population ages and star formation histories of dwarf galaxies. In this paper, we use high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations of Local Group-analogue (LG) volumes in cold dark matter (CDM), sterile neutrino warm dark matter (WDM) and self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) models with the eagle galaxy formation code to study how galaxy formation times change with dark matter model. We are able to identify the same haloes in different simulations, since they share the same initial density field phases. We find that the stellar mass of galaxies depends systematically on resolution, and can differ by as much as a factor of 2 in haloes of a given dark matter mass. The evolution of the stellar populations in SIDM is largely identical to that of CDM, but in WDM early star formation is instead suppressed. The time at which LG haloes can begin to form stars through atomic cooling is delayed by ∼200 Myr in WDM models compared to CDM. It will be necessary to measure stellar ages of old populations to a precision of better than 100 Myr, and to address degeneracies with the redshift of reionization – and potentially other baryonic processes – in order to use these observables to distinguish between dark matter models.


2004 ◽  
Vol 220 ◽  
pp. 91-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Taylor ◽  
J. Silk ◽  
A. Babul

Models of structure formation based on cold dark matter predict that most of the small dark matter haloes that first formed at high redshift would have merged into larger systems by the present epoch. Substructure in present-day haloes preserves the remains of these ancient systems, providing the only direct information we may ever have about the low-mass end of the power spectrum. We describe some recent attempts to model halo substructure down to very small masses, using a semi-analytic model of halo formation. We make a preliminary comparison between the model predictions, observations of substructure in lensed systems, and the properties of local satellite galaxies.


Author(s):  
M. Romanello ◽  
N. Menci ◽  
M. Castellano

In this paper we investigate how the Reionization process is affected by early galaxy formation in different cosmological scenarios. We use a semi-analytic model with suppressed initial power spectra to obtain the UV Luminosity Function in thermal Warm Dark Matter and sterile neutrino cosmologies. We retrace the ionization history of intergalactic medium with hot stellar emission only, exploiting fixed and variable photons escape fraction models ( fesc). For each cosmology, we find an upper limit to fixed fesc, which guarantees the completion of the process at z <6.7. The analysis is tested with two limit hypothesis on high-z ionized hydrogen volume fraction, comparing our predictions with observational results.


2020 ◽  
Vol 494 (2) ◽  
pp. 2027-2044 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Mocz ◽  
Anastasia Fialkov ◽  
Mark Vogelsberger ◽  
Fernando Becerra ◽  
Xuejian Shen ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Bose–Einstein condensate dark matter (BECDM, also known as fuzzy dark matter) is motivated by fundamental physics and has recently received significant attention as a serious alternative to the established cold dark matter (CDM) model. We perform cosmological simulations of BECDM gravitationally coupled to baryons and investigate structure formation at high redshifts (z ≳ 5) for a boson mass m = 2.5 × 10−22 eV, exploring the dynamical effects of its wavelike nature on the cosmic web and the formation of first galaxies. Our BECDM simulations are directly compared to CDM as well as to simulations where the dynamical quantum potential is ignored and only the initial suppression of the power spectrum is considered – a warm dark matter-like (‘WDM’) model often used as a proxy for BECDM. Our simulations confirm that ‘WDM’ is a good approximation to BECDM on large cosmological scales even in the presence of the baryonic feedback. Similarities also exist on small scales, with primordial star formation happening both in isolated haloes and continuously along cosmic filaments; the latter effect is not present in CDM. Global star formation and metal enrichment in these first galaxies are delayed in BECDM/‘WDM’ compared to the CDM case: in BECDM/‘WDM’ first stars form at z ∼ 13/13.5, while in CDM star formation starts at z ∼ 35. The signature of BECDM interference, not present in ‘WDM’, is seen in the evolved dark matter power spectrum: although the small-scale structure is initially suppressed, power on kpc scales is added at lower redshifts. Our simulations lay the groundwork for realistic simulations of galaxy formation in BECDM.


2019 ◽  
Vol 489 (1) ◽  
pp. 487-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boyan K Stoychev ◽  
Keri L Dixon ◽  
Andrea V Macciò ◽  
Marvin Blank ◽  
Aaron A Dutton

ABSTRACT We use 38 high-resolution simulations of galaxy formation between redshift 10 and 5 to study the impact of a 3 keV warm dark matter (WDM) candidate on the high-redshift Universe. We focus our attention on the stellar mass function and the global star formation rate and consider the consequences for reionization, namely the neutral hydrogen fraction evolution and the electron scattering optical depth. We find that three different effects contribute to differentiate warm and cold dark matter (CDM) predictions: WDM suppresses the number of haloes with mass less than few 109 M⊙; at a fixed halo mass, WDM produces fewer stars than CDM, and finally at halo masses below 109 M⊙, WDM has a larger fraction of dark haloes than CDM post-reionization. These three effects combine to produce a lower stellar mass function in WDM for galaxies with stellar masses at and below 107 M⊙. For z > 7, the global star formation density is lower by a factor of two in the WDM scenario, and for a fixed escape fraction, the fraction of neutral hydrogen is higher by 0.3 at z ∼ 6. This latter quantity can be partially reconciled with CDM and observations only by increasing the escape fraction from 23 per cent to 34 per cent. Overall, our study shows that galaxy formation simulations at high redshift are a key tool to differentiate between dark matter candidates given a model for baryonic physics.


1987 ◽  
Vol 117 ◽  
pp. 360-360
Author(s):  
Edmund Bertschinger

ABSTRACT The mass spectrum of bound baryonic systems (galaxies and globular clusters) is computed as a function of redshift in an Einstein-de Sitter (Ω=1) universe dominated by weakly interacting, cold dark matter. Baryons are assumed to fall into primordial density peaks in the cold particle distribution when the mass in the peaks exceeds the baryon Jeans mass. The distribution of peaks is computed using Gaussian statistics. As the universe expands the baryonic mass attached to a given peak increases because of infall (treated in a spherical approximation), and new peaks of lower amplitude become nonlinear. Globular clusters form first (by z∼40 if the galaxies represent a biased mass distribution). The remaining gas may be reheated to ∼10000 K if a few percent of globular cluster (or Pop. III) stars are very massive. Reheating increases the baryon Jeans mass and delays galaxy formation until z≲10. The present method reproduces the shape (but not the amplitude) of the Schechter galaxy mass function when merging of substructure is included in an approximate fashion.


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