THE CATERPILLAR PROJECT: A LARGE SUITE OF MILKY WAY SIZED HALOS
Name
Griffen-2016-THE CATERPILLAR PROJ.pdf
Size
4.15 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
91f8d4585d2715b1555eab3a397ef8a5
Author(s)
Vogelsberger, Mark
O’Shea, Brian W.
Ji, Alexander Pung
Dooley, Gregory Alan
Gomez, Facundo A.
Frebel, Anna L.
Griffen, Brendan F.
Date Issued
February 2016
Journal
The Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Citation
Griffen, Brendan F., Alexander P. Ji, Gregory A. Dooley, Facundo A. Gomez, Mark Vogelsberger, Brian W. O’Shea, and Anna Frebel. “THE CATERPILLAR PROJECT: A LARGE SUITE OF MILKY WAY SIZED HALOS.” The Astrophysical Journal 818, no. 1 (February 2, 2016): 10. © 2016 The American Astronomical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We present the largest number of Milky Way sized dark matter halos simulated at very high mass (~10[superscript 4]Mʘ/particle) and temporal resolution (5 Myr/snapshot) done to date, quadrupling what is currently available in the literature. This initial suite consists of the first 24 halos of the Caterpillar Project whose project goal of 60–70 halos will be made public when complete. We do not bias our halo selection by the size of the Lagrangian volume. We resolve ~20,000 gravitationally bound subhalos within the virial radius of each host halo. Improvements were made upon current state-of-the-art halo finders to better identify substructure at such high resolutions, and on average we recover ~4 subhalos in each host halo above 10[superscript 8]Mʘ which would have otherwise not been found. The density profiles of relaxed host halos are reasonably fit by Einasto profiles (α = 0.169 ± 0.023) with dependence on the assembly history of a given halo. Averaging over all halos, the substructure mass fraction is f[subscript m,subs] = 0.121± 0.041, and mass function slope is dN/dM propto M[superscript -1.88 ± 0.10}. We find concentration-dependent scatter in the normalizations at fixed halo mass. Our detailed contamination study of 264 low-resolution halos has resulted in unprecedentedly large high-resolution regions around our host halos for our fiducial resolution (sphere of radius ~ 1.4 ± 0.4 Mpc). This suite will allow detailed studies of low mass dwarf galaxies out to large galactocentric radii and the very first stellar systems at high redshift (z > 15).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3847/0004-637x/818/1/10
