The Aquarius Project: the subhaloes of galactic haloes

We have performed the largest ever particle simulation of a Milky Way sized dark matter halo, and present the most comprehensive convergence study for an individual dark matter halo carried out thus far. We have also simulated a sample of six ultrahighly resolved Milky Way sized haloes, allowing us to estimate the halo-to-halo scatter in substructure statistics. In our largest simulation, we resolve nearly 300 000 gravitationally bound subhaloes within the virialized region of the halo. Simulations of the same object differing in mass resolution by factors of up to 1800 accurately reproduce the largest subhaloes with the same mass, maximum circular velocity and position, and yield good convergence for the…

• AC
  Aspen Center for Physics
• RG
  Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
• SA
  Science and Technology Facilities Council

  Awards: ST/F002289/1, ST/F002300/1
• L
  Leibniz-Gemeinschaft