Simulation measures dark matter fractions in the Milky Way and highlights origins from the Large Magellanic Cloud.
High-velocity particles ( v>vₑsc) in the Milky Way are rare but nonetheless important to characterize due to their impact on dark matter (DM) direct detection experiments. We select halos similar in mass to the Milky Way in a large-volume dark matter simulation and measure the incidence of high-velocity particles, finding that an average fraction ~ 1.3× 10⁻⁵ of the DM particles have Δ v > 600 km/s within 5-11 kpc of the halo centers. However, some systems have dramatically higher fractions. Milky Way-like systems with high-speed satellites can have high-velocity DM fractions of order ~ 100× higher than average. The environment also affects high-velocity DM fractions; massive nearby halos ( >10¹³ M_) can boost high-velocity DM density by ~ 10×, although there is little effect for nearby Andromeda-like systems. We confirm previous predictions from zoom-in simulations that the high-velocity particles in the Milky Way with heliocentric speeds $>700$ km/s primarily originate from the Large Magellanic Cloud, and provide a table of expected high-velocity DM densities at different heliocentric velocity thresholds.
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DeBrae et al. (2025) studied this question.
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