Spatial and Dynamical Biases in Velocity Statistics of Galaxies

Abstract

We present velocity statistics of galaxies and their biases inferred from the statistics of the underlying dark matter using a cosmological hydrodynamic simulation of galaxy formation in low-density and spatially flat (Ohm(0) = 0.3 and lambda(0) = 0.7) cold dark matter cosmogony. Our simulation is based on a particle-particle-particle-mesh ((PM)-M-3) N-body Poisson solver and smoothed particle hydrodynamics. Galaxies in our simulation are identified as clumps of cold and dense gas particles and classified as young and old galaxies according to their formation epochs. We find that the pairwise velocity dispersion (PVD) of all galaxies is significantly lower than that of the dark matter particles and that the PVD of the young galaxies is lower than that of the old types, and even of all galaxies together, especially at small separations. These results are in reasonable agreement with the recent measurements of PVDs in the Las Campanas redshift survey, the IRAS Point Source Catalogue Redshift Survey, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data. We also find that the low PVD of young galaxies is due to the effects of dynamical friction as well as the different spatial distribution, while the difference in the PVD between all galaxies and dark matter can be mostly ascribed to their different spatial distributions. We also consider the mean infall velocity and the POTENT density reconstruction that are often used to measure the cosmological parameters, and investigate the effects of spatial bias and dynamical friction. In our simulation, the mean infall velocity of young galaxies is significantly lower than that of all the galaxies or of the old galaxies, and the dynamical bias becomes important on scales less than 3 h(-1) Mpc. The mass density field reconstructed from the velocity field of young galaxies using the POTENT-style method suffers in accuracy from both the spatial bias and the dynamical friction on the smoothing scale of R-s = 8 h(-1) Mpc. On the other hand, in the case of R-s = 12 h(-1) Mpc, which is typically adopted in the actual POTENT analysis, the density reconstruction based on various tracers of galaxies is reasonably accurate. We also analyze the motions of central galaxies and the velocity dispersion of galaxies within halos and discuss their implications for the motion of cD galaxies and the determination of the mass of galaxy groups.