Cosmic structures from a mathematical perspective. I: Dark matter halo mass density profiles

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Publication:776793

DOI10.1007/S10714-020-02715-WzbMATH Open1443.83075arXiv2002.00960OpenAlexW3005282026MaRDI QIDQ776793FDOQ776793


Authors: Jenny Wagner Edit this on Wikidata


Publication date: 13 July 2020

Published in: General Relativity and Gravitation (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The shapes of individual self-gravitating structures of an ensemble of identical, collisionless particles have remained elusive for decades. In particular, a reason why mass density profiles like the Navarro-Frenk-White or the Einasto profile are good fits to simulation- and observation-based dark matter halos has not been found. Given the class of three dimensional, spherically symmetric power-law probability density distributions to locate individual particles in the ensemble mentioned above, we derive the constraining equation for the power-law index for the most and least likely joint ensemble configurations. We find that any dark matter halo can be partitioned into three regions: a core, an intermediate part, and an outskirts part up to boundary radius rmathrmmax. The power-law index of the core is determined by the mean radius of the particle distribution within the core. The intermediate region becomes isothermal in the limit of infinitely many particles. The slope of the mass density profile far from the centre is determined by the choice of rmathrmmax with respect to the outmost halo particle, such that two typical limiting cases arise that explain the r3-slope for galaxy-cluster outskirts and the r4-slope for galactic outskirts. Hence, we succeed in deriving the mass density profiles of common fitting functions from a general viewpoint. These results also allow to find a simple explanation for the cusp-core-problem and to separate the halo description from its dynamics.


Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.00960




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