2014/09/09 by Frank C. van den Bosch, Fangzhou Jiang, Andrew P. Hearin +5 · 2 citations
Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Accretion (finance) #Astronomy #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics #Cold dark matter #Cosmology #Dark matter #Dark matter halo #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Gravitation #Gravitational potential #Halo #Mass ratio #Physics #Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.GA
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/mnras/stu1872
20 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS
arxiv created 2014/09/09 · openalex publication_date 2014/10/13 · arxiv updated 2015/06/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present a detailed study of how dark matter haloes assemble their mass and grow their (central) potential well. We characterize these via their mass accretion histories (MAHs) and potential well growth histories (PWGHs), which we extract from the Bolshoi simulation and from semi-analytical merger trees supplemented with a method to compute the maximum circular velocity, Vmax, of progenitor haloes. The results of both methods are in excellent agreement, both in terms of the average and the scatter. We show that the MAH and PWGH are tightly correlated, and that growth of the central potential precedes the assembly of mass; the maximum circular velocity is already half the present-day value by the time the halo has accreted only 2 per cent of its final mass. Finally, we demonstrate that MAHs have a universal form, which we use to develop a new and improved universal model that can be used to compute the average or median MAH and PWGH for a halo of any mass in any Λ cold dark matter cosmology, without having to run a numerical simulation or a set of halo merger trees.