Wednesday, March 27, 2024
15:30 - 17:00
Previous studies have shown that dark matter can form spherical haloes around massive objects such as black holes. When these black holes grow adiabatically, the density distribution of the halo shifts, as it contracts inwards to form a spike. For correct future observations of these spikes, an understanding of their shape is required. This study presents numerical N-body simulations of Hernquist haloes with an adiabatically grown black hole in their centres. We propose and derive a new analytical form of the radius of gravitational influence, depending only on the mass ratio of the black hole and the total system. We furthermore propose a new empirically found function for the radius of the spike, reducing to 26 times radius of gravitational influence for lower mass ratio's. Finally, we propose an empirical model for the shape of a DM spike, depending only on the mass ratio and a constant corresponding to the final slope of the spike. The latter is only constrained due to the resolution of the simulations, however does not exclude the analytically predicted value.
UvA-IoP
LAB42
L0.06
MSc Presentation
astrophysics, computational physics
Jasper Leonora Kamermans