Survival of gas in subhalos and its impact on the 21 cm forest signals: insights from hydrodynamic simulations

Abstract

Understanding the survival of gas within subhalos under various astrophysical processes is crucial for elucidating cosmic structure formation and evolution. We study the resilience of gas in subhalos, focusing on the impact of tidal and ram pressure stripping through hydrodynamic simulations. Our results uncover significant gas stripping primarily driven by ram pressure effects, which also profoundly influence the gas distribution within these subhalos. Notably, despite their vulnerability to ram pressure effects, the low-mass subhalos can play a pivotal role in influencing the observable characteristics of cosmic structures due to their large abundance. Specifically, we explore the application of our findings to the 21 cm forest, showing how the survival dynamics of gas in subhalos can modulate the 21 cm optical depth, a key probe for detecting minihalos in the pre-reionization era. Our previous study demonstrated that the 21 cm optical depth can be enhanced by the subhalos, but the effects of tidal and ram pressure stripping on the subhalo abundance have not been fully considered. In this work, we further investigate the contribution of subhalos to the 21 cm optical depth with hydrodynamic simulations, particularly highlighting the trajectories and fates of subhalos within mass ranges of 104-6M⊙h-1 in a host halo of 107M⊙h-1, and subhalos within mass range of 104-5M⊙h-1 in a host halo of 106M⊙h-1. Despite their susceptibility to ram pressure stripping, the contribution of abundant low-mass subhalos to the 21 cm optical depth is more significant than that of their massive counterparts primarily due to their greater abundance. We find that the 21 cm optical depth can be increased by a factor of approximately two due to the abundant low-mass subhalos. However, this enhancement is about twice as low as previously estimated in our earlier study, a discrepancy attributed to the effects of ram pressure stripping. Our work provides critical insights into the gas dynamics within subhalos in the early universe, highlighting their resilience against environmental stripping effects, and their impact on observable 21 cm signals.