Related papers: Can tides disrupt cold dark matter subhaloes?
A clear prediction of the Cold Dark Matter model is the existence of cuspy dark matter halo density profiles on all mass scales. This is not in agreement with the observed rotation curves of spiral galaxies, challenging on small scales the…
Stellar tidal streams are sensitive tracers of the properties of the gravitational potential in which they orbit and detailed observations of their density structure can be used to place stringent constraints on fluctuations in the…
We perform a detailed investigation into the disruption of central cusps via the transfer of energy from sinking massive objects. Constant density inner regions form at the radius where the enclosed mass approximately matches the mass of…
We investigate the diversity of dark matter (DM) density profiles in a large sample of late-type galaxies from the SPARC database, with the goal of testing whether a cusp-to-core transition occurs across galaxy mass scales. We perform…
We use N-body simulations to study the tidal evolution of globular clusters (GCs) in dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies. Our models adopt a cosmologically motivated scenario in which the dSph is approximated by a static NFW halo with a…
The cold dark matter scenario predicts that a large number of dark subhalos should be located within the halo of each Milky-way sized galaxy. One tell-tale signature of such dark subhalos could be additional milliarcsecond-scale image…
We analyze high resolution, N-body hydrodynamical simulations of fiducial galaxy clusters to probe tidal stripping of the dark matter subhalos. These simulations include a prescription for star formation allowing us to track the fate of the…
Recent observations of galaxy mergers inside galaxy cluster environments report high star formation rates in the ejected tidal tails, which point towards currently developing tidal dwarf galaxies. We test whether these dwarf objects could…
We explain in simple terms how the buildup of dark haloes by merging compact satellites, as in the CDM cosmology, inevitably leads to an inner cusp of density profile $\rho \propto r^{-\alpha}$ with $\alpha \gsim 1$, as seen in cosmological…
The shallow faint-end slope of the galaxy mass function is usually reproduced in $\Lambda$CDM galaxy formation models by assuming that the fraction of baryons that turns into stars drops steeply with decreasing halo mass and essentially…
Primordial dark matter (DM) haloes are the smallest gravitationally bound DM structures from which the first stars, black holes, and galaxies form and grow in the early universe. However, their structures are sensitive to the free streaming…
We study the effect of tidal torques on the collapse of density peaks through the equations of motion of a shell of barionic matter falling into the central regions of a cluster of galaxies. We calculate the time of collapse of the…
We explore observed dynamical trends in a wide range of dark matter dominated systems (about seven orders of magnitude in mass) to constrain hypothetical dark matter candidates and scenarios of structure formation. First, we argue that…
Dwarf galaxies have a wide variety of structures, such as dark matter (DM) distribution, stellar-to-halo mass ratio, and stellar density. Recent high-resolution simulations have shown a variety of stellar-to-halo mass ratios for dwarf…
We use very high resolution cosmological zoom simulations to follow the early evolution of twelve first-generation haloes formed from gaussian initial conditions with scale-free power spectra truncated on small scales by a gaussian in…
Physics lectures always refer to the tides as a disruptive effect. However, tides can also be compressive. When the potential of two galaxies overlap, as happens during a merger, fully compressive tides can develop and have a strong impact…
Rotation curves of galaxies probe their total mass distributions, including dark matter. Dwarf galaxies are excellent systems to investigate the dark matter density distribution, as they tend to have larger fractions of dark matter compared…
Recent studies found the densities of dark matter (DM) subhaloes which surround nearby dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) to be significantly lower than those of the most massive subhaloes expected around Milky Way sized galaxies in…
"Hard" massive black hole (MBH) binaries embedded in steep stellar cusps can shrink via three-body slingshot interactions. We show that this process will inevitably be accompanied by a burst of stellar tidal disruptions, at a rate that can…
Recent years have seen a series of large-scale photometric surveys with the aim of detecting substructure in nearby dwarf galaxies. Some of these objects display a varying distribution of each stellar population, reflecting their star…