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Milky Way-est: Cosmological Zoom-in Simulations with Large Magellanic Cloud and Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus Analogs

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arxiv 2404.08043 v2 pith:KZRY3GXD submitted 2024-04-11 astro-ph.GA astro-ph.CO

Milky Way-est: Cosmological Zoom-in Simulations with Large Magellanic Cloud and Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus Analogs

classification astro-ph.GA astro-ph.CO
keywords milkyway-estsubhaloapproxhostsmassmathrmhalo
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We present Milky Way-est, a suite of 20 cosmological cold-dark-matter-only zoom-in simulations of Milky Way (MW)-like host halos. Milky Way-est hosts are selected such that they (i) are consistent with the MW's measured halo mass and concentration, (ii) accrete a Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)-like ($\approx 10^{11}~M_{\odot}$) subhalo within the last $2~\mathrm{Gyr}$ on a realistic orbit, placing them near $50~\mathrm{kpc}$ from the host center at $z\approx 0$, and (iii) undergo a $>$1:5 sub-to-host halo mass ratio merger with a Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE)-like system at early times ($0.67<z<3$). Hosts satisfying these LMC and GSE constraints constitute $< 1\%$ of all halos in the MW's mass range, and their total masses grow rapidly at late times due to LMC analog accretion. Compared to hosts of a similar final halo mass that are not selected to include LMC and GSE analogs, Milky Way-est hosts contain $22\%$ more subhalos with present-day virial masses above $10^8~M_{\odot}$ throughout the virial radius, on average. This enhancement reaches $\approx 80\%$ in the inner $100~\mathrm{kpc}$ and is largely, if not entirely, due to LMC-associated subhalos. These systems also induce spatial anisotropy in Milky Way-est subhalo populations, with $\approx 60\%$ of the total subhalo population within $100~\mathrm{kpc}$ found in the current direction of the LMC. Meanwhile, we find that GSE-associated subhalos do not significantly contribute to present-day Milky Way-est subhalo populations. These results provide context for our Galaxy's dark matter structure and subhalo population and will help interpret a range of measurements that are currently only possible in the MW.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. LMC-induced Perturbations in the Milky Way Halo II: Bridging Field-level Inference and Summary-level Simulation-Based Inference

    astro-ph.GA 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    A field-level flow-matching likelihood shows the raw 6D halo phase-space distribution carries 2.5-9.9x more MW-LMC parameter information than velocity moments; adding BFE+MOPED summaries recovers much of this gap.

  2. A Unified Halo Mass Function Across Dark Matter Models from High-Resolution Multi-Scale Simulations

    astro-ph.CO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A calibrated fitting function for the halo mass function that unifies predictions across CDM and non-CDM models over 10 orders of magnitude in mass with typical 12% precision after modeling systematics.

  3. Cosmological Simulations of Stellar Halos with Gaia Sausage-Enceladus Analogues: Two Sausages, One Bun?

    astro-ph.GA 2024-08 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    TNG50 simulations of 98 Milky Way analogues find GSE-like debris in 32 cases, with two-merger GSEs in one third; single- and two-merger cases differ in median infall time (5.9 vs 10.7 Gyr ago), abundances, and star-fo...