Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2012 iii Paper 60 2 ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Take the retained disc mass to be the cosmic baryon fraction of the total dark matter halo mass: , where . Adopt and describe the disc gravity by . The structure coefficient must be stated: the scale-free Mestel disc gives when its flat rotation speed and enclosed mass are used, while a finite disc requires boundary and thickness information. The equality of edge specific angular momentum gives , with . Combining these relations gives the angular-momentum-conserving self-gravitating disc radius:With the commonly intended approximation,The corresponding masses are and , where is the solar mass.
For a definite formation estimate, assume the dark matter halo acquired this mass and radius at virial equilibrium, retained them afterward, and had mean density with . This uses the matter-dominated spherical-collapse model as an approximation to the specified matter-plus-vacuum cosmology. Since ,The approximate distance therefore gives formation modestly before observation. Using the numerical rather than approximate distance integral gives , within the accuracy of these structural assumptions. The calculation also assumes inclination-corrected spectroscopy, negligible disc pressure support, conserved edge specific angular momentum, no substantial later accretion or mergers, and no significant baryon loss.
This formation redshift is model-dependent, not uniquely fixed by the stated disc data. Keeping explicit gives . In particular, replacing the mean-density convention by times the critical density gives and , later than the observation. That inconsistent chronological result cannot be silently used as the formation epoch.
There is a further idealization in applying exactly at the edge: an abruptly truncated razor-thin disc with nonzero edge surface density of a disk has a logarithmically divergent in-plane force at that edge. Locally the available mass occupies a half-plane, and its radial contribution is proportional to , with no opposite exterior half-plane to cancel it. Finite thickness or a smooth taper removes that sharp-edge force singularity of a thin disk. Thus is an explicitly qualified Mestel disc or monopole-scale approximation, not an exact finite-disc calculation; enclosed mass does not determine a disc rotation curve.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2012 iii Paper 60 3 iii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
The dark matter halo population follows gravitational hierarchical galaxy formation: many low-mass dark-matter haloes and an exponentially rare high-mass tail. The Press-Schechter halo mass function captures this broad form. A constant conversion from dark matter halo mass to luminosity would simply rescale that distribution and predict too much light from both very small and very large systems. The luminosity function instead has a shallower faint end and a sharp bright-end decline, often described by a Schechter function,Define the halo star-formation efficiency as , distinguishing this integrated baryon conversion from the star-formation efficiency per free-fall time. If the stellar mass-to-light ratio is , a simple one-central-galaxy mapping is . For a monotone mapping without scatter,Thus a mass-dependent conversion efficiency and its Jacobian change the shape, not just the horizontal scale, of the luminosity function. Scatter, satellites and the stellar mass-to-light ratio add further differences.
Schematic halo and galaxy abundance shapes and the integrated baryon-to-star efficiency versus halo mass
. Details. In shallow potential wells, photoheating can prevent gas accretion, while stellar feedback from radiation, stellar winds and supernovae heats or ejects gas. These effects lower halo star-formation efficiency toward low mass, helping flatten the faint end. The need for atomic or molecular line cooling also affects the smallest systems. Intermediate-mass dark-matter haloes retain gas and cool efficiently, so the integrated conversion reaches a maximum around galactic dark matter halo masses.
In massive dark-matter haloes, long optically thin gas cooling times and stable hot atmospheres reduce fresh cold-gas supply. Active-galactic-nucleus feedback can replenish the thermal energy lost in cooling and suppress a cooling flow, reducing halo star-formation efficiency and sharpening the bright cutoff. Massive group or cluster dark-matter haloes contain many distinct galaxies rather than one object with luminosity proportional to their entire mass. Galaxy mergers redistribute stars and can grow already formed bright galaxies, but do not turn all hot dark matter halo gas into new stars. The luminosity function is the gravitational dark matter halo population filtered through strongly mass-dependent baryonic physics. The plotted abundance and efficiency curves are qualitative examples, not observational fits or calibrated mass-to-light relations.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2012 iii Paper 60 3 ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Let be the hydrogen mass fraction, the gravitating gas fraction, and the total-particle-to-hydrogen ratio. The optically thin gas cooling time and free-fall time of a uniform sphere arewhere . Equating them gives the cooling-to-free-fall equality curve:At fixed composition, its shape is . Gas above this curve cools faster than it falls; gas below it cools more slowly. Strong line cooling produces a deep low-density trough. In the high-temperature free-free regime, gives .
Cooling versus free-fall diagram with uniform-cloud virial mass contours and illustrative virial densities
. Details. The displayed uniform self-gravitating-cloud example uses , , and . Holding these ionized-gas factors fixed makes the diagram transparent, but near the atomic threshold their actual temperature dependence changes numerical normalizations. With these conventions the supplied cooling values imply and . For gas supported in a dark-matter-dominated dark matter halo, take : at fixed the free-fall time of a uniform sphere is shorter and the critical curve shifts upward by .
To add virial mass contours in a cooling diagram, use the uniform self-gravitating sphere consistently. Its Newtonian gravitational potential energy is and its thermal kinetic energy is . The virial theorem gives , while . Eliminating givesThus constant total gravitating mass gives slope three in the logarithmic density-temperature plane, with larger mass contours lying at smaller density. A different density profile changes the structural coefficient; the customary halo temperature scale shifts the mass contours but preserves their slopes. The horizontal illustrative formation-density lines are , using . They show why increasing formation cosmological redshift helps gas reach the rapid-cooling region.
At the low-mass end, a dark matter halo's virial temperature may not reach the atomic threshold. The atomic and molecular cooling thresholds for galaxy formation therefore favor an atomic-cooling mass of order at early formation epochs, with its precise value varying as approximately . Smaller primordial systems require molecules; photoheating and stellar feedback further suppress their luminous output.
At the high-mass end, the virial temperature at a fixed assembly density scales as . Beyond the line-cooling interval the gas becomes increasingly hot, while thermal bremsstrahlung improves only as . Hence at fixed assembly density in that regime. Large systems can remain pressure-supported hot atmospheres for many dynamical times, instead of promptly fragmenting into one stellar object. This is the upper galaxy mass from gas cooling: it associates efficient condensation with roughly galactic, rather than group or cluster, masses and motivates the broad – interval.
The diagram gives characteristic cooling scales, not exact universal mass bounds. Density profiles, gas fraction, enrichment and formation epoch move the boundaries; the two supplied values alone do not determine a complete numerical cutoff. Some gas can cool in dense cores of larger dark-matter haloes, early smaller progenitors can form stars before merging, and subsequent galaxy mergers can assemble more massive galaxies. Long-lived hot atmospheres also require heating to prevent excessive late-time cooling. These qualifications explain why the cooling criterion for galaxy formation is useful without equating each dark dark matter halo to one galaxy.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2013 iii Paper 55 1 ii Solution Created 2026-10-07 Updated 2026-10-14
If the gas can cool appreciably below the virial temperature, radiative cooling removes thermal energy and pressure support. In a dark matter halo the gas then contracts, dissipating more energy as it falls. Efficient condensation requires the radiative gas cooling time to be short enough compared with the relevant dynamical or assembly time; merely having an available low-temperature transition does not guarantee that the gas reaches it quickly.
The collisionless dark matter cannot lose comparable energy through radiation and remains extended. Gas with appreciable conserved angular momentum stops radial collapse when rotation supports it, often forming a disk; lower-angular-momentum gas reaches a more compact central region. Cold dense gas can fragment into self-gravitating clouds and form stars if its gravitational instability overcomes remaining support. Stellar feedback subsequently reheats or expels gas and regulates the conversion. Efficient cooling enables central baryonic condensation and star formation; angular momentum and feedback determine the resulting galaxy.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2013 iii Paper 55 1 i Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
If gas cannot radiate enough energy to fall below the virial temperature, infall converts gravitational energy into heat through shocks and compression. Thermal pressure can support an extended atmosphere in the dark matter halo. It need not have the same density profile as the collisionless dark matter, because its entropy and pressure matter.
A useful quantitative comparison is the radiative gas cooling time against the halo dynamical time . If cooling remains slow or a heating source balances it, the gas stays predominantly hot and diffuse, rather than forming a compact, cold, self-gravitating stellar system. Without sufficient cooling, most baryons remain pressure-supported halo gas. Very slow cooling can still feed gradual central condensation; the condition is about energy loss relative to the evolution time, not an absolute prohibition on any inward motion.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2013 iii Paper 55 1 Solution Created 2026-10-07 Updated 2026-10-14
Let and define the cosmological density power spectrum by . The contribution per logarithmic wave-number interval is the dimensionless cosmological power spectrum . The linear cosmological mass variance on mass scale iswith a comoving smoothing radius and the top-hat filter in Fourier space. On halo scales the observed spectrum is consistent with greater variance at smaller masses. Growth therefore brings smaller objects to the collapse threshold earlier, statistically; larger structures assemble by accretion and dark-matter halo mergers. This statistical growth from smaller bound systems to larger ones is hierarchical galaxy formation. It is an ordering of dark-matter assembly, not a rule that every small visible galaxy must precede every large visible galaxy.
For linear modes the linear growth factor gives . During matter domination , so and the characteristic nonlinear mass increases. Once modes become nonlinear, coupling between scales and halo formation change the shape, so the same multiplication cannot be used for the entire late-time spectrum. At low redshift accelerated expansion suppresses linear growth. Galaxy clustering traces the matter spectrum with galaxy bias; it should not be equated directly with an unbiased matter measurement.
The broad linear shape was set by the cosmological transfer function before and around matter-radiation equality, with baryonic acoustic structure also imprinted before recombination. A nearly scale-invariant primordial curvature spectrum has , with close to one. After converting curvature perturbations to matter-density perturbations,Thus nearly scale-invariant primordial curvature does not mean a constant density . Modes with enter the horizon after equality and have . Modes with enter during radiation domination, when radiation controls the expansion and cold-matter perturbations grow only slowly. The cold-dark-matter transfer function behaves approximately as at large . Hence the density spectrum turns over near :The turnover records the equality horizon, while the late nonlinear excess records gravitational clustering. On galactic scales the effective slope is greater than , giving the growing small-scale variance needed for hierarchical galaxy formation.
Cold dark matter has negligible primordial thermal velocities and a very short collisionless free streaming length on galactic scales. Warm dark matter has appreciable residual velocities while structure is being seeded; particles stream across small fluctuations and reduce their contrast. Its cosmological transfer function is consequently cut off below a characteristic length, suppressing low-mass halos and delaying their formation. Above that cutoff its assembly can still be hierarchical. The important distinction is the free-streaming scale, rather than the present temperature or an arbitrary particle-mass label.
Linear evolution assumes . When becomes of order unity, overdense regions depart strongly from the Hubble flow and can turn around and collapse. Collisionless dark matter develops multistream motion after trajectories cross; gravitational mixing redistributes energy and produces a bound dark matter halo. The formal infinite-density collapse of an ideal spherical pressureless solution is not the physical endpoint. A roughly virialized halo has and a characteristic virial velocity . Its gas virial temperature is conventionallyIt measures the thermal energy associated with the gravitational potential; the numerical factor depends on the velocity-dispersion convention. It does not imply that the collisionless dark matter has a thermodynamic gas temperature.
The unheaded request about baryon conversion efficiency of a halo is also answered here. Define using the cosmic baryon fraction . In small halos, shallow potentials let stellar feedback drive outflows or repeatedly heat star-forming gas; supernova energy per stellar mass is roughly fixed while binding energy per gas mass scales as . Photoheating during reionization also prevents very small halos from retaining or accreting cool gas. Molecular/atomic cooling thresholds further reduce star formation in the smallest systems. These effects make fall toward low mass.
Near , gas can cool efficiently and the potential is deep enough to retain more of it, while a long-lived hot atmosphere and maintenance heating are less effective than in larger systems. At high mass, higher virial temperature and lower cooling efficiency let a substantial hot atmosphere persist. Active-galactic-nucleus feedback can prevent that atmosphere from supplying cold gas and can expel some gas; the cooling-time bottleneck alone is not an adequate explanation for the low stellar fractions of massive groups and clusters. The peak reflects a competition between gas supply/cooling and feedback, rather than complete conversion of all baryons at a sharply universal mass. Its exact location and height depend on epoch, metallicity, gas history and the stellar population included.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2014 iii Paper 56 1 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
In the Lambda-CDM model, nearly Gaussian primordial density contrasts grow under gravity within an expanding universe containing cold dark matter, ordinary baryons and a cosmological constant. The cold dark matter is effectively collisionless and has negligible pressure on galactic scales. Before recombination, baryons are coupled to the photon fluid: radiation pressure and acoustic oscillations prevent their perturbations from behaving like pressureless matter. After recombination they can fall into the gravitational potentials already established by dark matter, subject to gas pressure and the Jeans mass.
For small density contrasts, evolution is linear. On pressure-free scales the growing mode is multiplied by the linear growth factor , with during matter domination. The cosmological density power spectrum can be writtenHere is the cosmological transfer function. For nearly scale-invariant initial conditions, the large-scale matter spectrum behaves approximately as , whereas well inside the matter-radiation equality scale it falls approximately as , until the microscopic dark-matter cutoff matters. This fall of the dimensional does not imply less fluctuation power on every smaller mass scale: the power per logarithmic wavenumber is , and the smoothed matter density variance is obtained by integrating it against a mass-dependent window. Over the relevant cold-dark-matter hierarchy, smaller mass windows generally have larger variance.
The hierarchical galaxy formation picture follows: fluctuations on small mass scales typically reach the nonlinear collapse threshold first, while larger objects assemble later through accretion and dark-matter halo mergers. It is a statistical ordering, not a claim that every small object precedes every large rare peak. When becomes order unity, the linear growth factor is no longer a solution for the local density. Collisionless dark matter develops multistream regions and bound dark matter halos; phase mixing and violent relaxation redistribute orbital energies, and virialized structures approximately obey the virial theorem.
Baryons have an additional nonlinear route. Infall and shocks convert bulk kinetic energy into thermal energy, with characteristic virial temperatureUnlike collisionless dark matter, the gas can lose this energy through radiative cooling. The optically thin gas cooling time is the thermal-energy density divided by the radiative loss rate, for exampleThe density convention in must agree with the denominator; the astrophysical cooling function can also be defined using instead. The cooling criterion for galaxy formation compares this time with the collapse or supply time. Rapidly cooling gas loses pressure support, contracts and can form stars. Slowly cooling gas remains in a hot atmosphere. Stable virial shocks are not obligatory in every low-mass system: gas can also arrive in cold streams and cool while being accreted.
Angular momentum prevents indefinite radial contraction. Tidal torque theory supplies an initial halo spin, and later mergers change it. If gas radiates energy while retaining much of its specific angular momentum, it settles into a rotationally supported galactic disk rather than reaching the centre. The relation explains why modest halo spin can set a disk radius much smaller than its virial radius of a dark-matter halo. Torques, bars and gravitational encounters can transport angular momentum outwards and feed central concentrations; radiative cooling alone does not remove it.
Galaxy mergers alter stellar structure as well as assembling mass. A major galaxy merger can strongly disturb or destroy an existing galactic disk, randomizing stellar orbits and creating a spheroid through violent relaxation. A gas-rich galaxy merger also permits dissipation, inflow and a burst of star formation; gas left over or accreted afterwards can rebuild a galactic disk. Minor galaxy mergers add stars to outer components, thicken disks and grow bulges. Dry galaxy mergers add stellar mass and can increase size without much new star formation. Halo merging therefore does not imply instantaneous merging of its galaxies: satellite orbital decay requires Chandrasekhar dynamical friction and can take a substantial time.
The atomic and molecular cooling thresholds for galaxy formation supply a lower characteristic scale. Primordial atomic gas cools inefficiently below roughly because electronic excitation is suppressed. The corresponding halo mass is of order at a redshift of order ten, with approximate dependence at fixed threshold temperature. Molecular hydrogen can cool gas at hundreds of kelvin and permit smaller early objects, provided it forms and survives dissociating radiation. Metal-line cooling changes these thresholds after enrichment. Thus the atomic threshold is not an absolute minimum mass for all stellar systems.
At the other end, sufficiently massive dark matter halos have high virial temperatures and low-density hot gas. Above the strong atomic-line-cooling interval, thermal bremsstrahlung has . At comparable halo gas density, , while depends mainly on formation density. Cooling therefore becomes less able to condense all the gas within the available time. This upper galaxy mass from gas cooling argument selects galaxy-sized condensations, broadly halo masses around – in simple low-redshift estimates, rather than single luminous galaxies containing every baryon in a group or cluster. Its numerical scale depends on epoch, metallicity and gas profile. Subsequent galaxy mergers can build larger stellar systems; cooling is not an absolute upper bound on their final mass.
Finally, a Press-Schechter halo mass function has many low-mass objects and a steep high-mass cutoff, while the luminosity function of galaxies also has a faint component and a bright cutoff, often described by a Schechter function. The two shapes are related through the halo-to-galaxy luminosity mapping, not by identifying luminosity with total halo mass. In the idealized one-central-galaxy, no-scatter limit,If and , then . A constant conversion gives similar shapes. Actual stellar feedback, inefficient low-temperature cooling and reionization suppress faint galaxies relative to small haloes, while long cooling times and active-galactic-nucleus feedback suppress luminosity at large halo masses. Satellites, scatter, stellar populations and dust further affect the correspondence. The halo hierarchy supplies the gravitational framework; cooling, angular momentum and feedback determine which parts become luminous galaxies.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2019 iii Paper 346 3 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Assume nonrelativistic pressureless matter, an initial irrotational vector field of growing-mode linear cosmological density perturbations, a homogeneous expanding background, and no shell crossing. All gradients below refer to initial comoving coordinates. Let , with , and normalize the linear growth factor by . The paper calls a growth rate, but it is the dimensionless growth factor; is its time derivative.
Writing for the actual position at , the Zeldovich approximation is, to first order,This explicitly gives . The usual notation instead uses the uniform reference Lagrangian coordinate , with . The two labels can be interchanged inside a first-order displacement, but not in the unperturbed position without the initial displacement correction.
To determine , mass conservation between the initial and current positions givesDemanding gives . The irrotational vector field assumption makes a gradient; the initial cosmological Poisson equation is . With the same boundary conditions for these potential equations, and after removing an irrelevant uniform translation,The evolution of follows from the linearized peculiar-motion equation . Since cosmological Poisson equation gives to this order, substitution yields the linear growth equationThus the approximation extrapolates the linear growing displacement along a fixed initial direction, even as its density mapping becomes nonlinear.
The early spin of a dark matter halo comes from an external gravitational torque on its nonspherical initial mass region. A uniform external acceleration moves its centre of mass without spinning it; the spatially varying tidal tensor exerts different forces on different parts. The tidal torque theory requires misalignment of the region's shape and the surrounding tidal field. A local irrotational vector field of velocity does not imply zero integrated angular momentum for a nonspherical region.
Put and use the physical peculiar velocity . The physical lever arm is , while a leading-order mass element is . Substituting the velocity formula into the supplied definition of angular momentum about the centre of mass givesTerms from the perturbed mass measure are higher order. Subtracting the barycentre's velocity also changes nothing because at this order.
Apply the divergence theorem componentwise:The antisymmetry of the Levi-Civita symbol kills the last term. Consequently, for the ordinary oriented comoving surface element ,The original PDF prints a different coefficient, . That coefficient does not follow from its own mass measure and velocity equation and has the wrong dimensions for total angular momentum. The corrected coefficient above also gives the time dependence consistent with the paper's later tensor expression; this is a source typo, not a TeX transcription issue.
For a spherical centered on its barycentre, the outward normal is parallel to , so pointwise. HenceFor an equipotential surface, on , andThereforeThe second conclusion holds for any boundary shape at this order, not just a sphere.
To extract the leading tidal torque, expand the initial peculiar gravitational potential about the barycentre using its Taylor series:The constant has no force; has zero integrated torque because the first mass moment vanishes. With the mass second-moment tensorwe obtainThe second equality swaps the indices and uses the symmetry of both tensors. Define the initial acceleration tidal tensor byThen the formula in the question has exactly the stated sign:If one defines as the positive Hessian matrix of instead, the displayed contraction has a plus sign. Defining the convention is essential. Also, the paper's is a mass second-moment tensor; the mechanical inertia tensor is .
Only the anisotropic parts contribute: a multiple of the identity produces zero contraction with the Levi-Civita symbol. In axes where , for example,Thus a spherical region or tensors sharing principal axes have zero leading torque; unequal principal moments together with off-diagonal tidal components create spin. The Taylor series truncation assumes that higher spatial derivatives of the tidal field are sufficiently small across the region.
In an Einstein-de Sitter universe, , , and . The initial and are time independent, soThis is early-time growth for fixed initial matter, before collapse invalidates the extrapolation. It does not predict indefinite linear spin growth for a virialized halo.
Two reasons for only approximate agreement with simulations are that nonlinear collapse and shell crossing change the trajectories and the tidal field, invalidating the first-order displacement and fixed leading tidal tensor; and that real halos undergo dark-matter halo mergers, anisotropic accretion, and exchange of material and angular momentum, so the halo identified at a later time need not be the same isolated collection of initial particles. These processes can change both the magnitude and the direction of the spin.
Stellar halo 2026-10-14
A stellar halo is the extended, approximately spheroidal stellar population surrounding a galaxy. It differs from the total dark matter halo. If its outer luminosity density is , its projected light follows the projection of a spherical power-law emissivity and scales as away from breaks and outer truncation.

