Warps and Bars from the External Tidal Torques of Tumbling Dark Halos

TL;DR

This study investigates how external tidal torques from tumbling dark matter halos influence spiral galaxy dynamics, causing warps, bars, and spiral structures, which may explain peculiar features observed in real galaxies.

Contribution

It demonstrates through simulations that external torques from tumbling dark halos can induce long-lived warps, bars, and spiral features in disk galaxies, revealing a previously overlooked influence.

Findings

Dark halo torques induce long-lived galactic warps.

External torques can trigger bar instabilities.

Forced spiral structures appear at disk edges.

Abstract

The dark matter halos in $\Lambda$CDM cosmological simulations are triaxial and highly flattened. In many cases, these triaxial equilibria are also tumbling slowly, typically about their short axes, with periods of order a Hubble time. Halos may therefore exert a slowly changing external torque on spiral galaxies that can affect their dynamical evolution in interesting ways. We examine the effect of the external torques exerted by a tumbling quadrupolar tidal field on the evolution of spiral galaxies using N-body simulations with realistic, disk galaxy models. We measure the amplitude of the external quadrupole moments of dark halos in cosmological simulations and use these to force disk galaxy models in a series of N-body experiments for a range of pattern speeds. We find that the torques are strong enough to induce long lived transient warps in disks similar to those observed in real spirals and also induce the bar instability at later times in some galaxy models that are otherwise stable for long periods of time in isolation. We also observe forced spiral structure near the edge of the disk where normally self-gravity is too weak to be responsible for such structure. This overlooked influence of dark halos may well be responsible for many of the peculiar aspects of disk galaxy dynamics.