Peaks above the Maxwellian Sea: a new approach to finding substructures in N-body haloes

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dc.creator Elahi, Pascal J.
dc.creator Thacker, Robert John, 1970-
dc.creator Widrow, Lawrence M.
dc.date.accessioned 2018-06-05T13:37:49Z
dc.date.available 2018-06-05T13:37:49Z
dc.date.issued 2011-11
dc.identifier.issn 0035-8711
dc.identifier.uri http://library2.smu.ca/handle/01/27540
dc.description Publisher's Version/PDF
dc.description.abstract We describe a new algorithm for finding substructures within dark matter haloes from N-body simulations. The algorithm relies upon the fact that dynamically distinct substructures in a halo will have a local velocity distribution that differs significantly from the mean, i.e. smooth background halo. We characterize the large-scale mean field using a coarsely grained cell-based approach, while a kernel-smoothing process is used to determined the local velocity distribution. Comparing the ratio of these two estimates allows us to identify particles that are strongly clustered in velocity space relative to the background and thus resident in a substructure. From this population of outliers, groups are identified using a Friends-of-Friends-like approach. False positives are rejected using Poisson noise arguments. This approach does not require a search of the full phase-space structure of a halo, a non-trivial task, and is thus computationally advantageous. We apply our algorithm to several test cases and show that it identifies not only subhaloes, bound overdensities in phase space, but can recover tidal streams with a high purity. Our method can even find streams which do not appear significantly overdense either physically or in phase space. en_CA
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dc.description.provenance Made available in DSpace on 2018-06-05T13:37:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Thacker_Robert_J_article_2011.pdf: 3454105 bytes, checksum: 0a20d4f12f3b4312e23bb61081c4681e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-11 en
dc.language.iso en en_CA
dc.publisher Wiley-Blackwell en_CA
dc.relation.uri https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.19485.x
dc.rights This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ©: 2011 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
dc.subject.lcsh Many-body problem -- Numerical solutions
dc.subject.lcsh Galactic halos
dc.subject.lcsh Dark matter (Astronomy)
dc.title Peaks above the Maxwellian Sea: a new approach to finding substructures in N-body haloes en_CA
dc.type Text en_CA
dcterms.bibliographicCitation Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 418(1), 320-335. (2011) en_CA
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This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ©: 2011 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
 
Published Version: https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.19485.x
 
 

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