Author ORCID Identifier
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-21-2022
Abstract
The condensation of baryons within a dark matter (DM) halo during galaxy formation should result in some contraction of the halo as the combined system settles into equilibrium. We quantify this effect on the cuspy primordial halos predicted by DM-only simulations for the baryon distributions observed in the galaxies of the SPARC database. We find that the DM halos of high surface brightness galaxies (with Σeff 3; 100L pc-2 at 3.6 μm) experience strong contraction. Halos become more cuspy as a result of compression: the inner DM density slope increases with the baryonic surface mass density. We iteratively fit rotation curves to find the balance between initial halo parameters (constrained by abundance matching), compression, and stellar mass-to-light ratio. The resulting fits often require lower stellar masses than expected for stellar populations, particularly in galaxies with bulges: stellar mass must be reduced to make room for the DM it compresses. This trade off between dark and luminous mass is reminiscent of the cusp-core problem in dwarf galaxies, but occurs in more massive systems: the present-epoch DM halos cannot follow from cuspy primordial halos unless (1) the stellar mass-to-light ratios are systematically smaller than expected from standard stellar population synthesis models, and/or (2) there is a net outward mass redistribution from the initial cusp, even in massive galaxies widely considered to be immune from such effects.
Keywords
Dark matter, Galaxies: dwarf, Galaxies: irregular, Galaxies: kinematics and dynamics, Galaxies: spiral
Publication Title
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Grant
1911909
Rights
© The Authors 2022. This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Incorporating baryon-driven contraction of dark matter halos in rotation curve fits Pengfei Li, Stacy S. McGaugh, Federico Lelli, James M. Schombert and Marcel S. Pawlowski A&A, 665 (2022) A143 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202243916
Manuscript Version
Final Publisher Version