DM halo morphological types of MW-like galaxies in the TNG50 simulation: Simple, Twisted, or Stretched

One of the most intriguing properties of the dark matter (DM) halos in the Milky Way galaxy is its morphological structure. It is well motivated to approximate the DM halo shape with a triaxial ellipsoid and find the radial profile of the semi-major and semi-minor axes of that ellipsoid. Yet the correspondence between the Eigen-Values and Eigen-Vectors of this ellipsoid is left to be understood and contains novel information about the halo structure and its merger history. In this talk, I will present a new way of analyzing the DM morphology, and more general galactic shape, that enables us to categorize different halo types. Using TNG50 run of the  IllustrisTNG project, I analyze the MW like galaxies in TNG50 and classify the halos into three main categories known as: simple, twisted and stretched halos. I will describe the properties of each class in detail and visualize the 3D ellipsoids in the space and show how the halo may re-orientate in space. It is intriguing to apply this method to the real data and figure out which class of models our MW galaxy might be belong to!

Sponsored by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.