The Equilibrium Structure of Cosmological Halos

We have derived an analytical model for the postcollapse equilibrium structure of cosmological halos as nonsingular truncated isothermal spheres (TIS) and compared this model with observations and simulations of cosmological halos on all scales. Our model is in good agreement with the observations of the internal structure of dark-matter-dominated halos from dwarf galaxies to X-ray clusters. It reproduces many of the average properties of halos in CDM simulations to good accuracy, including the density profiles outside the central region, while avoiding the possible discrepancy at small radii between observed galaxy and cluster density profiles and the singular density profiles predicted by N-body simulations of the CDM model. While much attention has been focused lately on this possible discrepancy, we show that the observed galaxy rotation curves and correlations of halo properties nevertheless contain valuable additional information with which to test the theory, despite this uncertainty at small radii. The available data allows us to constrain the fundamental cosmological parameters and also to put a unique constraint on the primordial density fluctuation power spectrum at large wavenumbers (i.e. small mass scale).