A general relativistic approach to the Navarro–Frenk–White galactic halos

Abstract

Although galactic dark matter halos are basically Newtonian structures, the study of their interplay with large-scale cosmic evolution and with relativistic effects, such as gravitational lenses, quintessence sources or gravitational waves, makes it necessary to obtain adequate relativistic descriptions for these self-gravitating systems. With this purpose in mind, we construct a post-Newtonian fluid framework for the ‘Navarro–Frenk–White’ (NFW) models of galactic halos that follow from N-body numerical simulations. Since these simulations are unable to resolve regions very near the halo centre, the extrapolation of the fitting formula leads to a spherically averaged ‘universal’ density profile that diverges at the origin. We remove this inconvenient feature by replacing a small central region of the NFW halo with an interior Schwarzschild solution with constant density, continuously matched to the remaining NFW spacetime. A model of a single halo, as an isolated object with finite mass, follows by smoothly matching the NFW spacetime to a Schwarzschild vacuum exterior along the virial radius, the physical ‘cut-off’ customarily imposed, as the mass associated with NFW profiles diverges asymptotically. Numerical simulations assume weakly interacting collisionless particles, hence we suggest that NFW halos approximately satisfy an ‘ideal gas’ type of equation of state, where mass-density is the dominant rest-mass contribution to matter-energy, with the internal energy contribution associated with an anisotropic kinetic pressure. We show that, outside the central core, this pressure and the mass density roughly satisfy a polytropic relation. Since stellar polytropes are the equilibrium configurations in Tsallis' non-extensive formalism of statistical mechanics, we argue that NFW halos might provide a rough empirical estimate of the free parameter q of Tsallis' formalism.