Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/398

Title

The evolution of substructure - II. Linking dynamics to environment

Author(s)

Gill, Stuart P.;  Knebe, Alexander;  Gibson, Brad K.;  Dopita, Michael A.

Abstract

We present results from a series of high-resolution N-body simulations that focus on the formation and evolution of eight dark matter haloes, each of the order of a million particles within the virial radius. We follow the time evolution of hundreds of satellite galaxies with unprecedented time resolution, relating their physical properties to the differing halo environmental conditions. The self-consistent cosmological framework in which our analysis was undertaken allows us to explore satellite disruption within live host potentials, a natural complement to earlier work conducted within static potentials. Our host haloes were chosen to sample a variety of formation histories, ages and triaxialities; despite their obvious differences, we find striking similarities within the associated substructure populations. Namely, all satellite orbits follow nearly the same eccentricity distribution with a correlation between eccentricity and pericentre. We also find that the destruction rate of the substructure population is nearly independent of the mass, age and triaxiality of the host halo. There are, however, subtle differences in the velocity anisotropy of the satellite distribution. We find that the local velocity bias at all radii is greater than unity for all haloes and this increases as we move closer to the halo centre, where it varies from 1.1 to 1.4. For the global velocity bias, we find a small but slightly positive bias, although when we restrict the global velocity bias calculation to satellites that have had at least one orbit, the bias is essentially removed.

Publication type

Journal article

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology. School of Biophysical Sciences and Electrical Engineering. Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing

Source

Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 351, no. 2 (2004), pp. 410-422

Publication year

2004

Publisher

Blackwell Publishers

Format

pp. 410-422

ISSN

0035-8711

Publisher URL

Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2004.07913.x

Copyright

© 2004 RAS.

Peer reviewed