On N-body simulations of globular cluster streams

Abstract

ABSTRACT Stellar tidal streams are sensitive tracers of the properties of the gravitational potential in which they orbit and detailed observations of their density structure can be used to place stringent constraints on fluctuations in the potential caused by, e.g. the expected populations of dark matter subhaloes in the standard cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm. Simulations of the evolution of stellar streams in live N-body haloes without low-mass dark matter subhaloes, however, indicate that streams exhibit significant perturbations on small scales even in the absence of substructure. Here, we demonstrate, using high-resolution N-body simulations combined with sophisticated semi-analytical and simple analytical models, that the mass resolutions of 104–$10^5\, \rm {M}_{\odot }$ commonly used to perform such simulations cause spurious stream density variations with a similar magnitude on large scales as those expected from a CDM-like subhalo population and an order of magnitude larger on small, yet observable, scales. We estimate that mass resolutions of ${\approx}100\, \rm {M}_{\odot }$ (${\approx}1\, \rm {M}_{\odot }$) are necessary for spurious, numerical density variations to be well below the CDM subhalo expectation on large (small) scales. That streams are sensitive to a simulation’s particle mass down to such small masses indicates that streams are sensitive to dark matter clustering down to these low masses if a significant fraction of the dark matter is clustered or concentrated in this way, for example, in MACHO models with masses of 10–$100\, \rm {M}_{\odot }$.