Halos and galaxies in the standard cosmological model: results from the Bolshoi simulation

TL;DR

This paper presents detailed results from the Bolshoi simulation, a high-resolution cosmological N-body simulation, providing insights into halo and subhalo properties, their distributions, and galaxy luminosity relations within the standard LCDM model.

Contribution

The study offers the first comprehensive analysis of halo and subhalo statistics from the Bolshoi simulation, including accurate mass functions, concentration parameters, and galaxy luminosity relations.

Findings

Sheth-Tormen mass function over-predicts halos at high redshift.

Subhalo velocity function follows a V**(-3) power law.

Luminosity-velocity relation matches observed Tully-Fisher relation.

Abstract

We present the first results from the new Bolshoi N-body cosmological LCDM simulation that uses cosmological parameters favored by current observations. The Bolshoi simulation was done in a volume 250Mpc on a side using 8billion particles with mass and force resolution adequate to follow subhalos down to a completeness limit of Vcirc=50km/ s circular velocity. Using excellent statistics of halos and subhalos (10M at every moment and 50M over the whole history) we present accurate approximations for statistics such as the halo mass function, the concentrations for distinct halos and subhalos, abundance of halos as function of their circular velocity, the abundance and the spatial distribution of subhalos. We find that at high redshifts the concentration falls to a minimum of about 3.8 and then rises slightly for higher values of halo mass. We find that while the Sheth-Tormen approximation for the mass function of halos found by spherical overdensity is accurate at low redshifts, it over-predicts the abundance of halos by nearly an order of magnitude by z=10. We find that the number of subhalos scales with the circular velocity of the host halo as Vhost**0.5, and that subhalos have nearly the same radial distribution as dark matter particles at radii 0.3-2 times the host halo virial radius. The subhalo velocity function n(>V) behaves as V**(-3). We give normalization of this relation for different masses and redshifts. Finally, we use an abundance-matching procedure to assign r-band luminosities to dark matter halos as a function of halo Vcirc, and find that the luminosity-velocity relation is in remarkably good agreement with the observed Tully-Fisher relation for galaxies in the range 50-200km/s.