On the formation and stability of fermionic dark matter haloes in a cosmological framework
The formation and stability of collisionless self-gravitating systems is a long standing problem, which dates back to the work of D. Lynden-Bell on violent relaxation, and extends to the issue of virialization of dark matter (DM) halos. An important prediction of such a relaxation process is that sp...
| Autores: | , , , |
|---|---|
| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2021 |
| País: | Argentina |
| Institución: | Universidad Nacional de La Plata |
| Repositorio: | SEDICI (UNLP) |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:sedici.unlp.edu.ar:10915/125050 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/handle/10915/125050 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Ciencias Astronómicas Methods: numerical Galaxies: haloes Galaxies: nuclei Galaxies: formation Galaxies: structure Dark matter |
| Sumario: | The formation and stability of collisionless self-gravitating systems is a long standing problem, which dates back to the work of D. Lynden-Bell on violent relaxation, and extends to the issue of virialization of dark matter (DM) halos. An important prediction of such a relaxation process is that spherical equilibrium states can be described by a Fermi-Dirac phase-space distribution, when the extremization of a coarse-grained entropy is reached. In the case of DM fermions, the most general solution develops a degenerate compact core surrounded by a diluted halo. As shown recently, the latter is able to explain the galaxy rotation curves while the DM core can mimic the central black hole. A yet open problem is whether this kind of astrophysical core-halo configurations can form at all, and if they remain stable within cosmological timescales. We assess these issues by performing a thermodynamic stability analysis in the microcanonical ensemble for solutions with given particle number at halo virialization in a cosmological framework. For the first time we demonstrate that the above core-halo DM profiles are stable (i.e. maxima of entropy) and extremely long lived. We find the existence of a critical point at the onset of instability of the core-halo solutions, where the fermion-core collapses towards a supermassive black hole. For particle masses in the keV range, the core-collapse can only occur for Mvir≳109M⊙ starting at zvir ≈ 10 in the given cosmological framework. Our results prove that DM halos with a core-halo morphology are a very plausible outcome within nonlinear stages of structure formation. |
|---|