Variation of the subhalo abundance in dark matter halos

Abstract

We analyzed the statistics of subhalo abundance of galaxy-sized and giant-galaxy-sized halos formed in a high-resolution cosmological simulation of a 46.5 Mpc cube with the uniform mass resolution of 106 M. We analyzed all halos with mass more than 1.5 × 1012 M formed in this simulation box. The total number of halos was 125. We found that the subhalo abundance, measured by the number of subhalos with maximum rotation velocity larger than 10% of that of the parent halo, shows large halo-to-halo variations. The results of recent ultra-high-resolution runs fall within the variation of our samples. We found that the concentration parameter and the radius at the moment of the maximum expansion show fairly tight correlation with the subhalo abundance. This correlation suggests that the variation of the subhalo abundance is at least partly due to the difference in the formation history. Halos formed earlier have a smaller number of subhalos at present. © 2009 The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.