Tidal Heating of Stellar Clusters in Fuzzy Dark Matter Halos
Abstract
Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies serve as powerful testing grounds for wave dark matter models through dynamical stellar heating. Previous simulation-based work derived a lower bound on the fuzzy dark matter particle mass using a diffusion approximation valid only when the de Broglie wavelength is much smaller than the galaxy’s half-light radius. We simulate the dynamical evolution of stellar clusters in FDM halos across a wide mass range and find that for sufficiently low masses, where the de Broglie wavelength is much larger than the cluster size, tidal heating is the main mechanism. We also find that a reduced soliton mass and tidally stripped halo can suppress the heating. We demonstrate that in order to constrain FDM mass from cluster heating, the structure and environment of the FDM halo must be carefully considered.
Type
Publication
arXiv
Authors
Assistant Professor
Xinyu Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy, Tsinghua University. He is fond of discovering fundamental physical laws from the vast observation of various astrophysical objects. His research areas are high energy astrophysics, plasma astrophysics and cosmology. His research topics cover a broad range of physical scales: from the smallest fundamental particles like electrons and ultralight axions, to neutron stars, black holes and galaxies, and to the largest scale structure of the universe.