Tidal stripping of dark matter subhalos by baryons from analytical perspectives: disk shocking and encounters with stars

TL;DR

This paper analytically investigates how baryonic processes like disk shocking and stellar encounters strip dark matter subhalos, revealing their significant impact on subhalo mass functions and distributions, especially at small scales.

Contribution

It provides new analytical results on penetrative stellar encounters and their effects on subhalo mass loss, extending previous models and offering insights for subhalo population predictions.

Findings

Subhalos lighter than ~1 M_sun are efficiently pruned by stellar encounters.

Disk shocking is more effective at removing massive subhalos.

Surviving subhalos are heavily stripped, with altered mass functions.

Abstract

The cold dark matter (CDM) scenario predicts that galactic halos should host a huge amount of subhalos possibly lighter than planets, depending on the nature of dark matter. Predicting their abundance and distribution has important implications for dark matter searches and searches for subhalos themselves, as they could provide a decisive test of the CDM paradigm. A major difficulty in subhalo population model building is to account for the gravitational stripping induced by baryons, which strongly impact on the overall dynamics inside galaxies. In this paper, we focus on these "baryonic" tides from analytical perspectives, summarizing previous work on galactic disk shocking, and thoroughly revisiting the impact of individual encounters with stars. For the latter, we go beyond the reference calculation of Gerhard and Fall (1983) to deal with penetrative encounters, and provide new analytical results. Based upon a full statistical analysis of subhalo energy change during multiple stellar encounters possibly occurring during disk crossing, we show that subhalos lighter than $\sim 1$~M$_\odot$ are very efficiently pruned by stellar encounters. This modifies their mass function in a stellar environment. In contrast, disk shocking is more efficient at pruning massive subhalos. In short, if reasonably resilient, subhalos surviving disk crossing have lost all their mass but an inner cuspy part, with a tidal mass function strongly departing from the cosmological one. If fragile, stellar encounters make their number density drop by an additional order of magnitude with respect to disk-shocking effects only (e.g., at the solar position in the Milky Way). Our results can be incorporated to any analytical or numerical subhalo population model, as we show for illustration. This study complements those based on cosmological simulations, which cannot resolve dark matter subhalos on such small scales.