English

The radial acceleration relation is a natural consequence of the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2019-09-11 v1

Abstract

Galaxies covering several orders of magnitude in stellar mass and a variety of Hubble types have been shown to follow the "Radial Acceleration Relation" (RAR), a relationship between gobsg_{\rm obs}, the observed circular acceleration of the galaxy, and gbarg_{\rm bar}, the acceleration due to the total baryonic mass of the galaxy. For accelerations above 1010 ms210^{10}~{\rm m \, s}^{-2}, gobsg_{\rm obs} traces gbarg_{\rm bar}, asymptoting to the 1:1 line. Below this scale, there is a break in the relation such that gobsgbar1/2\rm g_{\rm obs} \sim g_{\rm bar}^{1/2}. We show that the RAR slope, scatter and the acceleration scale are all natural consequences of the well-known baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR). We further demonstrate that galaxies with a variety of baryonic and dark matter (DM) profiles and a wide range of dark halo and galaxy properties (well beyond those expected in CDM) lie on the RAR if we simply require that their rotation curves satisfy the BTFR. We explore conditions needed to break this degeneracy: sub-kpc resolved rotation curves inside of "cored" DM-dominated profiles and/or outside 100\gg 100\,kpc could lie on BTFR but deviate in the RAR, providing new constraints on DM.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.01849,
  title  = {The radial acceleration relation is a natural consequence of the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation},
  author = {Coral Wheeler and Philip F. Hopkins and Olivier Doré},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.01849},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

5 pages, submitted to MNRAS