Determination of Dark Matter Halo Mass from Dynamics of Satellite Galaxies

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to estimate dark matter halo mass using the phase space distribution of satellite galaxies, achieving about 25-40% accuracy with current data and highlighting the influence of halo formation history.

Contribution

It introduces a new likelihood-based approach to infer halo mass from satellite dynamics, accounting for formation history dependence and scaling from simulations.

Findings

Mass can be estimated within ~40% accuracy with current satellite data.

Using 30 tracers improves accuracy to ~25%.

Formation history imposes a ~20% minimum uncertainty.

Abstract

We show that the mass of a dark matter halo can be inferred from the dynamical status of its satellite galaxies. Using 9 dark-matter simulations of halos like the Milky Way (MW), we find that the present-day substructures in each halo follow a characteristic distribution in the phase space of orbital binding energy and angular momentum, and that this distribution is similar from halo to halo but has an intrinsic dependence on the halo formation history. We construct this distribution directly from the simulations for a specific halo and extend the result to halos of similar formation history but different masses by scaling. The mass of an observed halo can then be estimated by maximizing the likelihood in comparing the measured kinematic parameters of its satellite galaxies with these distributions. We test the validity and accuracy of this method with mock samples taken from the simulations. Using the positions, radial velocities, and proper motions of 9 tracers and assuming observational uncertainties comparable to those of MW satellite galaxies, we find that the halo mass can be recovered to within $\sim$40%. The accuracy can be improved to within $\sim$25% if 30 tracers are used. However, the dependence of the phase-space distribution on the halo formation history sets a minimum uncertainty of $\sim$20% that cannot be reduced by using more tracers. We believe that this minimum uncertainty also applies to any mass determination for a halo when the phase space information of other kinematic tracers is used.