Orbital parameters of infalling dark matter substructures

Abstract

We present distributions of the orbital parameters of dark matter substructures at the time of merging into their host halo. Accurate knowledge of the orbits of dark matter substructures is a crucial input to studies which aim to assess the effects of the cluster environment on galaxies, the heating of galaxy discs and many other topics. Orbits are measured for satellites in a large number of N-body simulations. We focus on the distribution of radial and tangential velocities, but consider also distributions of orbital eccentricity and semimajor axis. We show that the distribution of radial and tangential velocities has a simple form and provide a fitting formula for this distribution. We also search for possible correlations between the infall directions of pairs of satellites, finding evidence for positive correlation at small angular separations as expected if some infall occurs along filaments. We also find (weak) evidence for correlations between the direction of the infall and infall velocity and the spin of the host halo. © 2005 RAS.