一般认为暗晕是通过等级成团方式形成的:小质量暗晕先形成,进而通过并合形成较大质量的暗晕。并合后的小质量暗晕形成所谓的次结构,目前关于次结构的演化过程和分布特点尚无明确结论。介绍了利用数值模拟、半解析模型和观测来研究次结构分布和演化的进展,并特别讨论了次结构的并合时标、质量函数和空间分布等特性。
According to the cold dark matter(CDM) model,haloes form via hierarchical merger, i.e.,small haloes form first and subsequently merge to form bigger ones.The smaller halo in a merger event becomes the subhalo(substructure) of the bigger one,which is called as the host halo.It's still unclear how the subhaloes evolve and distribute in the host halo.In this paper, we review the progress of the studies on the evolution of dark matter subhalo using simulation, semi-analytical model(SAM) and observations. The best way to study the subhalo evolution is N-body simulation,which focus on the fully dynamical tracing of the subhalo trajectory and mass profile.It has been shown that there are several good scaling relations to describe the subhalo properties,such as the mass function, merging time scale and spatial distribution.It's important to understand the origin of these relations. In the past decade,semi-analytical models(SAMs) have been developed to study the evolution of subhalo.The SAMs consider a few important physical processes like tidal stripping,dynamical friction and tidal heating,and combines these mechanism with the merger trees,which describe the accretion history of dark matter haloes.The SAMs can reproduce the same subhalo properties as that obtained by simulation,and perform efficiently in computation.In fact,simulation results provide strong constraints to the parameters in the SAM,while the SAM interprets the physical mechanism of the subhalo evolution. Observationally,the number of satellites found in the Milky-Way(MW) has been doubled in the past decade.By assuming the relics of merging haloes can be regarded as dwarf galaxies in the normal galaxies or galaxies in the clusters and the subhalo can be treated as the satellite, we can directly compare model predictions with observations.There are discrepancies between observation and theoretical predictions.The probable reason may come from the resolution effect in the simulation or the selection effect in the observation.Further