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We investigate the morphology of the stellar distribution (SD) in a sample of Milky Way–like galaxies in the TNG50 simulation. Using a local in shell iterative method as the main approach, we explicitly show evidence of twisting (in about 52% of halos) and stretching (in 48% of them) in real space. This is matched with the reorientation observed in the eigenvectors of the inertia tensor and gives us a clear picture of having a reoriented SD. We make a comparison between the shape profile of the dark matter (DM) halo and SD and quite remarkably see that their radial profiles are fairly close, especially at small galactocentric radii, where the stellar disk is located. This implies that the DM halo is somewhat aligned with stars in response to the baryonic potential. The level of alignment mostly decreases away from the center. We study the impact of substructures in the orbital circularity parameter. It is demonstrated that in some cases, faraway substructures are counterrotating compared with the central stars and may flip the sign of total angular momentum and thus the orbital circularity parameter. Truncating them above 150 kpc, however, retains the disky structure of the galaxy as per initial selection. Including the impact of substructures in the shape of stars, we explicitly show that their contribution is subdominant. Overlaying our theoretical results on the observational constraints from previous literature, we establish fair agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a comprehensive analysis of the shape of dark matter (DM) halos in a sample of 25 Milky Way-like galaxies in TNG50 simulation. Using an enclosed volume iterative method, we infer an oblate-to-triaxial shape for the DM halo with median T ≃ 0.24. We group DM halos into three different categories. Simple halos (32% of the population) establish principal axes whose ordering in magnitude does not change with radius and whose orientations are almost fixed throughout the halo. Twisted halos (32%) experience levels of gradual rotations throughout their radial profiles. Finally, stretched halos (36%) demonstrate a stretching in the lengths of their principal axes where the ordering of different eigenvalues changes with radius. Subsequently, the halo experiences a "rotation" of ∼90° where the stretching occurs. Visualizing the 3D ellipsoid of each halo, for the first time, we report signs of a reorienting ellipsoid in twisted and stretched halos. We examine the impact of baryonic physics on DM halo shape through a comparison to dark matter only (DMO) simulations. This suggests a triaxial (prolate) halo. We analyze the impacts of substructure on DM halo shape in both hydrodynamical and DMO simulations and confirm that they are subdominant. We study the distribution of satellites in our sample. In simple and twisted halos, the angle between satellites' angular momentum and the galaxy's angular momentum grows with radius. However, stretched halos show a flat distribution of angles. Overlaying our theoretical outcome on the observational results presented in the literature establishes a fair agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the IllustrisTNG (TNG) simulations of galaxy formation to measure the velocity dispersion profiles of dark matter and stars in Milky Way–mass, galaxy group, and cluster-scale dark matter halos. The mean profiles calculated from both tracers are similar in shape, exhibiting a large halo-to-halo scatter around the average profile. The so-called "splashback" radius demarcates the outer boundary of the halo, and manifests as a kink in the velocity dispersion profile, located on average between ∼1.0–1.5r200m, where r200m is the radius within which the density of the halo equals 200 times the background density of the universe. We find that this location may also be identified as the radius at which the (stacked) dispersion profile drops to 60% of its peak value (for line-of-sight motions in TNG halos). We further show that the scatter in the dispersion profiles may be attributed to the variations in the assembly history of the host halos. In particular, this segregates the profile into two regimes: one within ∼0.1r200m, where the scatter is set by the early assembly history of the halo; and the other beyond this radius, where the scatter is influenced more strongly by its late-time assembly. Finally, we show that a two-parameter model can be used to fit the measured velocity dispersion profiles and the fit parameters can be related directly to two fundamental halo properties: mass and concentration. We describe a simple model that allows us to express the stellar velocity dispersion profile in terms of these halo properties only. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]