Simulating cosmological substructure in the solar neighbourhood

Simpson, Christine M; Gargiulo, Ignacio; Gómez, Facundo A; Grand, Robert JJ; Maffione, Nicolás; Cooper, Andrew P; Deason, Alis J; Frenk, Carlos; Helly, John; Marinacci, Federico; Pakmor, Rüdiger

Abstract

We explore the predictive power of cosmological, hydrodynamical simulations for stellar phase-space substructure and velocity correlations with the AURIGA simulations and AURIGAIA mock Gaia catalogues. We show that at the solar circle the AURIGA simulations commonly host phase-space structures in the stellar component that have constant orbital energies and arise from accreted subhaloes. These structures can persist for a few Gyr, even after coherent streams in position space have been erased. We also explore velocity two-point correlation functions and find this diagnostic is not deterministic for particular clustering patterns in phase space. Finally, we explore these structure diagnostics with the AURIGAIA catalogues and show that current catalogues have the ability to recover some structures in phase space but careful consideration is required to separate physical structures from numerical structures arising from catalogue generation methods.

Citation

Simpson, C. M., Gargiulo, I., Gómez, F. A., Grand, R. J., Maffione, N., Cooper, A. P., Deason, A. J., Frenk, C., Helly, J., Marinacci, F., & Pakmor, R. (2019). Simulating cosmological substructure in the solar neighbourhood. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, 490(1), L32-L37. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/slz142

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 23, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Sep 20, 2019
• Publication Date: Nov 30, 2019
• Deposit Date: Mar 11, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 11, 2020
• Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters
• Electronic ISSN: 1745-3933
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 490
• Issue: 1
• Pages: L32-L37
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/slz142
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1275471