Evidence of Turbulence-like Universality on the Formation of Galaxy-sized Dark Matter Haloes

TL;DR

This study investigates whether the formation of galaxy-sized dark matter haloes exhibits turbulence-like behavior, finding that their gravitational potential energy spectra follow a Kolmogorov power law, suggesting a turbulent analogy in gravitational clustering.

Contribution

It provides evidence that dark matter halo formation may be described by turbulence-like physics, a novel perspective in understanding nonlinear gravitational clustering.

Findings

Galaxy-sized haloes follow a Kolmogorov energy spectrum

Dark matter clustering may be modeled as a turbulent process

Potential energy spectra resemble turbulence in fluids

Abstract

Although the theoretical understanding of the nonlinear gravitational clustering has greatly advanced in the last decades, in particular by the outstanding improvement on numerical N-body simulations, the physics behind this process is not fully elucidated. The main goal of this work is the study of the possibility of a turbulent-like physical process in the formation of structures, galaxies and clusters of galaxies, by the action of gravity alone. We use simulation data from the Virgo Consortium, in ten redshift snapshots (from 0 to 10). From this we identify galaxy-sized and cluster-sized dark matter haloes, by using a FoF algorithm and applying a boundedness criteria, and study the gravitational potential energy spectra. We find that the galaxy-sized haloes energy spectrum follows closely a Kolmogorov's power law, similar to the behaviour of dynamically turbulent processes in fluids. This means that the gravitational clustering of dark matter may admit a turbulent-like representation.