Infall of substructures onto a milky way-like dark halo

Abstract

We analyze properties of subhalos/substructures resolved in a dark matter simulation of a Milky Way-like halo in a ΛCDM cosmology. We explore possible links between subhalos and the Galactic satellites and find: 1) The infall patterns of subhalos are slightly elongated along the major axis of the galaxy halo and are clumpy on smaller scales. 2) The Great disk defined by MW satellites (Kroupa et al. 2005) is easily reproduced in our simulations without recurring to sophisticated galaxy formation recipes and is purely due to their highly centrally concentrated distribution around the Galaxy.