Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 021301 (2004) [4 pages]Are Halos of Collisionless Cold Dark Matter Collisionless?
Chung-Pei Ma and Michael Boylan-Kolchin Received 2 March 2004; revised 6 May 2004; published 9 July 2004 We study whether gravitational scattering of halo dark matter particles by subhalos can connect two seemingly independent problems: the abundance of subhalos in dark matter halos and the cuspiness of the halos’ inner density profiles. Our numerical experiments indicate that subhalos can cause the collisionless dark matter particles in the centers of main halos to diffuse. Combined with tidal mass loss of the subhalos, this process introduces significant scatter in the inner density profiles and offers an explanation for the range of profiles seen in both observations and cosmological simulations. ©2004 The American Physical Society
URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.93.021301 [ Abstract | Previous article | Next article | Issue 2 ] |
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