On the detection of stellar wakes in the Milky Way: a deep learning approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Põder, Sven, Pata, Joosep, Benito, María, Asensio, Isaac Alonso, Vecchia, Claudio Dalla
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Põder, Sven
Pata, Joosep
Benito, María
Asensio, Isaac Alonso
Vecchia, Claudio Dalla
author_facet Põder, Sven
Pata, Joosep
Benito, María
Asensio, Isaac Alonso
Vecchia, Claudio Dalla
contents Due to poor observational constraints on the low-mass end of the subhalo mass function, the detection of dark matter (DM) subhalos on sub-galactic scales would provide valuable information about the nature of DM. Stellar wakes, induced by passing DM subhalos, encode information about the mass of the inducing perturber and thus serve as an indirect probe for the DM substructure within the Milky Way (MW). Our aim is to assess the viability and performance of deep learning searches for stellar wakes in the Galactic stellar halo caused by DM subhalos of varying mass. We simulate massive objects (subhalos) moving through a homogeneous medium of DM and star particles, with phase-space parameters tailored to replicate the conditions of the Galaxy at a specific distance from the Galactic center. The simulation data is used to train deep neural networks with the purpose of inferring both the presence and mass of the moving perturber, and assess subhalo detectability in varying conditions of the Galactic stellar and DM halos. We find that our binary classifier is able to infer the presence of subhalos, showing non-trivial performance down to a subhalo mass of $5 \times 10^7 \rm \, M_\odot$. We also find that our binary classifier is generalisable to datasets describing subhalo orbits at different Galactocentric distances. In a multiple-hypothesis case, we are able to discern between samples containing subhalos of different masses. Out of the phase-space observables available to us, we conclude that overdensity and velocity divergence are the most important features for subhalo detection performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_02749
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the detection of stellar wakes in the Milky Way: a deep learning approach
Põder, Sven
Pata, Joosep
Benito, María
Asensio, Isaac Alonso
Vecchia, Claudio Dalla
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Due to poor observational constraints on the low-mass end of the subhalo mass function, the detection of dark matter (DM) subhalos on sub-galactic scales would provide valuable information about the nature of DM. Stellar wakes, induced by passing DM subhalos, encode information about the mass of the inducing perturber and thus serve as an indirect probe for the DM substructure within the Milky Way (MW). Our aim is to assess the viability and performance of deep learning searches for stellar wakes in the Galactic stellar halo caused by DM subhalos of varying mass. We simulate massive objects (subhalos) moving through a homogeneous medium of DM and star particles, with phase-space parameters tailored to replicate the conditions of the Galaxy at a specific distance from the Galactic center. The simulation data is used to train deep neural networks with the purpose of inferring both the presence and mass of the moving perturber, and assess subhalo detectability in varying conditions of the Galactic stellar and DM halos. We find that our binary classifier is able to infer the presence of subhalos, showing non-trivial performance down to a subhalo mass of $5 \times 10^7 \rm \, M_\odot$. We also find that our binary classifier is generalisable to datasets describing subhalo orbits at different Galactocentric distances. In a multiple-hypothesis case, we are able to discern between samples containing subhalos of different masses. Out of the phase-space observables available to us, we conclude that overdensity and velocity divergence are the most important features for subhalo detection performance.
title On the detection of stellar wakes in the Milky Way: a deep learning approach
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02749