English

Comparing rotation curve observations to hydrodynamic {\Lambda}CDM simulations of galaxies

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2016-05-19 v1

Abstract

The formation of the disk and feedback from supernova winds impacts the distribution of dark matter in galaxies. Recently, Di Cintio et al. (2014b) characterized the halo response from baryonic processes in hydrodynamical simulations via a dependence on the ratio of stellar-to-halo mass (M/MhaloM_{\star}/M_{{\rm halo}}). The (stellar) mass dependent halo profile links together the local and global properties of the halo (e.g. inner slope and MhaloM_{{\rm halo}}) which allows for measurements of MhaloM_{{\rm halo}} without virial tracers. We compile a large sample of rotation curves from the literature to test this halo profile. We find that this halo profile can explain rotation curve observations over a wide range of MM_{\star}. However, the global results from our sample are inconsistent with a Λ\Lambda cold dark matter universe. We do not find the expected correlation between the halo concentration and MhaloM_{{\rm halo}} and there is significantly larger scatter than expected. Furthermore, a large portion of galaxies below M109MM_{\star} \sim 10^{9}\,M_{\odot} are found to be hosted by smaller halos than expectations from the abundance matching technique. We find our results are robust to statistical priors and systematic effects such as inclination angle, asymmetric drift correction, data source, and uncertainties in stellar mass-to-light ratios. This suggests either a mischaracterization of the halo response due to baryonic processes or additional non-standard dark matter physics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.05326,
  title  = {Comparing rotation curve observations to hydrodynamic {\Lambda}CDM simulations of galaxies},
  author = {Andrew B. Pace},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.05326},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

17 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables. Main results presented in Figure 5. Submitted to MNRAS. Comments welcome

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:03:08.948Z