The Effect of Gasdynamics on the Structure of Dark Matter Halos

Abstract

Adaptive SPH and N-body simulations were carried out to study the effect of gasdynamics on the structure of dark matter halos that result from the gravitational instability and fragmentation of cosmological pancakes. Such halos resemble those formed in a hierarchically clustering CDM universe and serve as a test-bed model for studying halo dynamics. With no gas, the density profile is close to the universal profile identified previously from N-body simulations of structure formation in CDM. When gas is included, the gas in the halo is approximately isothermal, and both the dark matter and the gas have singular central density profiles which are steeper than that of the dark matter with no gas. This worsens the disagreement between observations of constant density cores in cosmological halos and the singular ones found in simulations. We also find that the dark matter velocity distribution is less isotropic than found by N-body simulations of CDM, because of the strongly filamentary substructure.