Dynamical Effect of the Turbulence of IGM on the Baryon Fraction Distribution

Abstract

We investigate the dynamical effect of the turbulence in baryonic intergalactic medium (IGM) on the baryon fraction distribution. In the fully developed nonlinear regime, the IGM will evolve into the state of turbulence, containing strong and curved shocks, vorticity and complex structures. Turbulence would lead to the density and velocity fields of the IGM to be different from those of underlying collisionless dark matter. Consequently, the baryon fraction f_b will deviate from its cosmic mean . We study these phenomena with simulation samples produced by the weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) hybrid cosmological hydrodynamic/N-body code, which is effective of capturing shocks and complex structures. We find that the distribution of baryon fraction is highly nonuniform on scales from hundreds kpc to a few of Mpc, and f_b varies from as low as 1% to a few times of the cosmic mean. We further show that the turbulence pressure in the IGM is weakly scale-dependent and comparable to the gravitational energy density of halos with mass around 10^11 h-1 M\odot . The baryon fraction in halos with mass equal to or smaller than 10^11 h^-1 M\odot should be substantially lower than f_b^cosmic. Numerical results show that f_b is decreasing from 0.8 f_b^cosmic at halo mass scales around 10^12 h^-1 M\odot to 0.3f_b^cosmic at 10^11 h^-1 M\odot and shows further decrease when halo mass is less than 10^11 h^-1 M\odot. The strong mass dependence of f_b is similar to the observed results. Although the simulated f_b in halos are higher than the observed value by a factor of 2, the turbulence of the IGM should be an important dynamical reason leading to the remarkable missing of baryonic matter in halos with mass \leq 10^12 h^-1 M\odot.