Quick search Find article
Quick search
Find article

ANATOMY OF THE BAR INSTABILITY IN CUSPY DARK MATTER HALOS

FREE ISSUE

John Dubinski1, Ingo Berentzen2 and Isaac Shlosman3,4

Show affiliations


We examine the bar instability in galactic models with an exponential disk and a cuspy dark matter (DM) halo with a Navarro-Frenk-White cosmological density profile. The equilibrium models are constructed from a three-integral composite distribution function but subject to the bar instability. We generate a sequence of models with a range of mass resolution from 1.8 K to 18 M particles in the disk and 10 K to 100 M particles in the halo along with a multimass model with an effective resolution of ~1010 particles. We describe how mass resolution affects the bar instability, including its linear growth phase, the buckling instability, pattern speed decay through the resonant transfer of angular momentum to the DM halo, and the possible destruction of the halo cusp. Our higher resolution simulations show a converging spectrum of discrete resonance interactions between the bar and DM halo orbits. As the pattern speed decays, orbital resonances sweep through most of the DM halo phase space and widely distribute angular momentum among the halo particles. The halo does not develop a flat density core and preserves the cusp, except in the region dominated by gravitational softening. The formation of the bar increases the central stellar density and the DM is compressed adiabatically increasing the halo central density by 1.7 times. Overall, the evolution of the bar displays a convergent behavior for halo particle numbers between 1 M and 10 M particles, when comparing bar growth, pattern speed evolution, the DM halo density profile and a nonlinear analysis of the orbital resonances. Higher resolution simulations clearly illustrate the importance of discrete resonances in transporting the angular momentum from the bar to the halo.


Keywords

dark matter; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: kinematics and dynamics; galaxies: structure; methods: N-body simulations


Dates

Issue 1 (2009 May 20)

Received 2008 August 7, accepted for publication 2009 March 4

Published 2009 May 1



Users also read

What's this?
This innovative new feature generates a list of articles 'also read' by other users based on them reading the original article. Article abstracts citations and references are all considered and weighted accordingly. We hope that this will help you find relevant papers for your research.

  1. Evolution of Stellar Bars in Live Axisymmetric Halos: Recurrent Buckling and Secular Growth
  2. Disk Evolution and Bar Triggering Driven by Interactions with Dark Matter Substructure

View by subject




Export








Please login to access our web services, or create an account if you don't yet have one.

You must have cookies enabled in your web browser to be able to login.

Username
Password

Forgotten your password? Get a new one here.