Evolution of subhalo orbits in a smoothly-growing host halo potential

Abstract

The orbital parameters of dark matter (DM) subhaloes play an essential role in determining their mass-loss rates and overall spatial distribution within a host halo. Haloes in cosmological simulations grow by a combination of relatively smooth accretion and more violent mergers, and both processes will modify subhalo orbits. To isolate the impact of the smooth growth of the host halo from other relevant mechanisms, we study subhalo orbital evolution using numerical calculations in which subhaloes are modelled as massless particles orbiting in a time-varying spherical potential. We find that the radial action of the subhalo orbit decreases over the first few orbits, indicating that the response to the growth of the host halo is not adiabatic during this phase. The subhalo orbits can shrink by a factor of $\sim$1.5 in this phase. Subsequently, the radial action is well conserved and orbital contraction slows down. We propose a model accurately describing the orbital evolution. Given these results, we consider the spatial distribution of the population of subhaloes identified in high-resolution cosmological simulations. We find that it is consistent with this population having been accreted at z < 3, indicating that any subhaloes accreted earlier are unresolved in the simulations. We also discuss tidal stripping as a formation scenario for NGC1052-DF2, an ultra diffuse galaxy significantly lacking DM, and find that its expected DM mass could be consistent with observational constraints if its progenitor was accreted early enough, z > 1.5, although it should still be a relatively rare object.

15 pages, 11 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• A Tip of the Red Giant Branch Distance of $22.1\pm 1.2$ Mpc to the Dark Matter Deficient Galaxy NGC1052-DF2 from 40 Orbits of Hubble Space Telescope Imaging
• Tidal Stripping in the Adiabatic Limit
• Orbital dynamics and histories of satellite galaxies around Milky Way-mass galaxies in the FIRE simulations
• The Response of Dark Matter Haloes to Gas Ejection: CuspCore II
• Shedding light on low-mass subhalo survival and annihilation luminosity with numerical simulations
• The large-scale structure of globular clusters in the NGC 1052 group
• A universal model for the evolution of tidally stripped systems
• Imprints of tidal interactions on the stellar distribution of satellite galaxies: implications for dark matter deficient galaxies
• On the Tidal Formation of Dark Matter Deficient Galaxies