English

Weighing gas-rich starless halos: dark matter parameters inference from their gas distributions

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-05-15 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

Reionization-Limited HIH_{I} Clouds (RELHICs) are starless dark matter halos retaining a significant neutral hydrogen(HIH_{I} ) reservoir. The gas resides in near hydrostatic equilibrium within the dark matter potential and in thermal equilibrium with the cosmic ultraviolet background. This simplicity allows analytic frameworks to link observable HIH_{I} column densities directly to fundamental dark matter halo structural parameters. We systematically assess the accuracy of inferring host halo parameters from RELHIC gas distributions on an object-by-object basis, quantifying biases, intrinsic degeneracies, and the limits of parameter recovery. Using RELHICs from a redshift z = 0 high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamical simulation, we employ Bayesian nested sampling to infer dark matter halo mass and concentration. We evaluate this against 3D spherically averaged total gas and HIH_{I} density profiles, alongside 2D HIH_{I} column density profiles. We found that while the ensemble inference yields a robust, unbiased recovery of halo virial mass from 3D profiles, individual systems exhibit a mass-concentration degeneracy driven by local environmental density. Overdense environments yield slightly overestimated masses and underestimated concentrations; underdense regions show the inverse. We demonstrate that treating environmental density as a free parameter breaks this degeneracy and completely neutralizes the systematic mass bias. Although concentration recovery remains limited by simulation resolution, the virial mass is exceptionally well constrained, establishing a highly reliable framework for weighing starless halos in upcoming surveys.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.05597,
  title  = {Weighing gas-rich starless halos: dark matter parameters inference from their gas distributions},
  author = {Francesco Turini and Alejandro Benitez-Llambay},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05597},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

20 pages,19 figures, Accepted for publication in A&A