There's no place like home? Statistics of Milky Way-mass dark matter halos

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the distribution of structural properties of Milky Way-mass dark matter halos using the Millennium-II Simulation, revealing insights into subhalo statistics, merger histories, and implications for galaxy formation.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive statistical analysis of Milky Way-mass halos, comparing results with higher-resolution simulations and exploring implications for galaxy evolution.

Findings

Subhalo abundances are dominated by intrinsic scatter, not Poisson statistics.

Less than 10% chance a Milky Way halo hosts two Magellanic Cloud-like galaxies.

Mergers with significant impact on disks are common since redshift z=2.

Abstract

We present an analysis of the distribution of structural properties for Milky Way-mass halos in the Millennium-II Simulation (MS-II). This simulation of structure formation within the standard LCDM cosmology contains thousands of Milky Way-mass halos and has sufficient resolution to properly resolve many subhalos per host. It thus provides a major improvement in the statistical power available to explore the distribution of internal structure for halos of this mass. In addition, the MS-II contains lower resolution versions of the Aquarius Project halos, allowing us to compare our results to simulations of six halos at a much higher resolution. We study the distributions of mass assembly histories, of subhalo mass functions and accretion times, and of merger and stripping histories for subhalos capable of impacting disks at the centers of halos. We show that subhalo abundances are not well-described by Poisson statistics at low mass, but rather are dominated by intrinsic scatter. Using the masses of subhalos at infall and the abundance-matching assumption, there is less than a 10% chance that a Milky Way halo with M_vir =10^12 M_sun will host two galaxies as bright as the Magellanic Clouds. This probability rises to ~25% for a halo with M_vir=2.5 x 10^12 M_sun. The statistics relevant for disk heating are very sensitive to the mass range that is considered relevant. Mergers with infall mass : redshift zero virial mass greater than 1:30 could well impact a central galactic disk and are a near inevitability since z=2, whereas only half of all halos have had a merger with infall mass : redshift zero virial mass greater than 1:10 over this same period.