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We study how supersonic streaming velocities of baryons relative to dark matter—a large-scale effect imprinted at recombination and coherent over ∼3 Mpc scales—affect the formation of dwarf galaxies at z ≳ 5. We perform cosmological hydrodynamic simulations, including and excluding streaming velocities, in regions centered on halos with M _vir ( z = 0) ≈ 10 ^10 M _⊙ ; the simulations are part of the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE) project and run with FIRE-3 physics. Our simulations comprise many thousands of systems with halo masses between M _vir = 2 × 10 ^5 M _⊙ and 2 × 10 ^9 M _⊙ in the redshift range z = 20–5. A few hundred of these galaxies form stars and have stellar masses ranging from 100 to 10 ^7 M _⊙ . While star formation is globally delayed by approximately 50 Myr in the streaming relative to nonstreaming simulations and the number of luminous galaxies is correspondingly suppressed at high redshift in the streaming runs, these effects decay with time. By z = 5, the properties of the simulated galaxies are nearly identical in the streaming versus nonstreaming runs, indicating that any effects of streaming velocities on the properties of galaxies at the mass scale of classical dwarfs and larger do not persist to z = 0.

We describe a public data release of the FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations of galaxy formation (available at http://flathub.flatironinstitute.org/fire ) from the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE) project. FIRE-2 simulations achieve parsec-scale resolution to explicitly model the multiphase interstellar medium while implementing direct models for stellar evolution and feedback, including stellar winds, core-collapse and Type Ia supernovae, radiation pressure, photoionization, and photoelectric heating. We release complete snapshots from three suites of simulations. The first comprises 20 simulations that zoom in on 14 Milky Way (MW)–mass galaxies, five SMC/LMC-mass galaxies, and four lower-mass galaxies including one ultrafaint; we release 39 snapshots across z = 0–10. The second comprises four massive galaxies, with 19 snapshots across z = 1–10. Finally, a high-redshift suite comprises 22 simulations, with 11 snapshots across z = 5–10. Each simulation also includes dozens of resolved lower-mass (satellite) galaxies in its zoom-in region. Snapshots include all stored properties for all dark matter, gas, and star particles, including 11 elemental abundances for stars and gas, and formation times (ages) of star particles. We also release accompanying (sub)halo catalogs, which include galaxy properties and member star particles. For the simulations to z = 0, including all MW-mass galaxies, we release the formation coordinates and an “ex situ” flag for all star particles, pointers to track particles across snapshots, catalogs of stellar streams, and multipole basis expansions for the halo mass distributions. We describe publicly available python packages for reading and analyzing these simulations.

The shape and orientation of dark matter (DM) halos are sensitive to the microphysics of the DM particles, yet in many mass models, the symmetry axes of the Milky Way’s DM halo are often assumed to be aligned with the symmetry axes of the stellar disk. This is well motivated for the inner DM halo, but not for the outer halo. We use zoomed-in cosmological baryonic simulations from the Latte suite of FIRE-2 Milky Way–mass galaxies to explore the evolution of the DM halo’s orientation with radius and time, with or without a major merger with a Large Magellanic Cloud analog, and when varying the DM model. In three of the four cold DM halos we examine, the orientation of the halo minor axis diverges from the stellar disk vector by more than 20° beyond about 30 galactocentric kpc, reaching a maximum of 30°–90°, depending on the individual halo’s formation history. In identical simulations using a model of self-interacting DM with σ = 1 cm ^2 g ^−1 , the halo remains aligned with the stellar disk out to ∼200–400 kpc. Interactions with massive satellites ( M ≳ 4 × 10 ^10 M _⊙ at pericenter; M ≳ 3.3 × 10 ^10 M _⊙ at infall) affect the orientation of the halo significantly, aligning the halo’s major axis with the satellite galaxy from the disk to the virial radius. The relative orientation of the halo and disk beyond 30 kpc is a potential diagnostic of self-interacting DM, if the effects of massive satellites can be accounted for.

We study halo mass functions with the Press–Schechter formalism for interacting dark matter models, where matter power spectra are damped due to dark acoustic oscillations in the early universe. After adopting a smooth window function, we calibrate the analytical model with numerical simulations from the “effective theory of structure formation” (ETHOS) project and fix the model parameters in the high-mass regime, Mh ≳ 3 × 1010M⊙. We also perform high-resolution cosmological simulations with halo masses down to Mh ∼ 108M⊙ to cover a wide mass range for comparison. Although the model is calibrated with ETHOS1 and cold dark matter simulations for high halo masses at redshift z = 0, it successfully reproduces simulations for two other ETHOS models in the low-mass regime at low and high redshifts. As an application, we compare the cumulative number density of halos to that of observed galaxies at z = 6, and find that the interacting dark matter models with a kinetic decoupling temperature below 0.5 keV is disfavored. We also perform the abundance-matching analysis and derive the stellar–halo mass relation for these models at z = 4. Suppression in halo abundance leads to less massive halos that host observed galaxies in the stellar mass range . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]