Wednesday, January 11, 2012

1201.1940 (L. Gao et al.)

The Phoenix Project: the Dark Side of Rich Galaxy Clusters    [PDF]

L. Gao, J. F. Navarro, C. S. Frenk, A. Jenkins, V. Springel, S. D. M. White
[abridged] We introduce the Phoenix Project, a set of LCDM simulations of the dark matter component of nine rich galaxy clusters. Each cluster is simulated at least at two different numerical resolutions. For eight of them, the highest resolution corresponds to ~1.3e8 particles within the virial radius, while for one this number is over one billion. Because of their recent assembly, these cluster haloes are significantly less relaxed than galaxy haloes, leading to decreased regularity, increased halo-to-halo variations, and systematic differences in concentration and substructure fraction. All density profiles steepen gradually from the centre outwards, but there is considerable scatter in the dependence of logarithmic slope, gamma on radius. At the innermost convergence radius, r_conv ~3 kpc/h (~ 0.2% of the virial radius) the mean and rms scatter is gamma=1.05+-0.19 for the nine haloes. As for galaxy haloes, there is little indication of an approach to an asymptotic inner power law. For individual clusters, strongly aspherical mass distributions can produce projected surface density variations at given radius spanning up to a factor of three, depending on projection direction. This may in part explain the high apparent concentration of some observed strong-lensing clusters. The shape of the surface density profile, gamma_p(R) depends only weakly on projection direction, however, and is quite well approximated in the inner regions by the NFW formula. Substructure in the Phoenix haloes is slightly more abundant, especially in the inner regions, than in the galaxy haloes of the Aquarius Project. The subhalo mass function is also steeper: dN/dM \propto M^{-1.98} in the range 1e-6View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1940

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