Density Profiles of TNG 300 Voids across Cosmic Time

Abstract

We present radial density profiles, as traced by luminous galaxies and dark matter particles, for voids in 11 snapshots of the TNG 300 simulation. The snapshots span 11.65 Gyr of cosmic time, corresponding to the redshift range 0 ≤ z ≤ 3. Using the comoving galaxy fields, voids were identified via a well-tested, watershed transformation-based algorithm. Voids were defined to be underdense regions that are unlikely to have arisen from Poisson noise, resulting in the selection of ∼100–200 of the largest underdense regions in each snapshot. At all redshifts, the radial density profiles as traced by both the galaxies and the dark matter resemble inverse top-hat functions. However, details of the functions (particularly the underdensities of the innermost regions and the overdensities of the ridges) evolve considerably more for the dark matter density profiles than for the galaxy density profiles. At all redshifts, a linear relationship between the galaxy and dark matter density profiles exists, and the slope of the relationship is similar to the bias estimates for TNG 300 snapshots. Lastly, we identify distinct environments in which voids can exist, defining “void-in-void” and “void-in-cloud” populations (i.e., voids that reside in larger underdense or overdense regions, respectively), and we investigate ways in which the relative densities of dark matter and galaxies in the interiors and ridges of these structures vary as a function of void environment.