Evidence of turbulence-like universality in the formation of galaxy-sized dark matter haloes

Context. Although the theoretical understanding of nonlinear gravitational clustering has greatly advanced in the last decades, in particular by improvements in numerical N-body simulations, the physics behind this process is not fully elucidated. Aims. The main goal of this work is the study of the possibility of a turbulent-like physical process in the formation of structures, galaxies and clusters of galaxies, by the action of gravity alone. Methods. We use simulation data from the Virgo Consortium, in ten redshift snapshots (from 0 to 10). From this we identify galaxy-sized and cluster-sized dark matter haloes, by using a FoF algorithm and applying a boundedness criterion, and study the gravitational potential energy spectra. Results. We find that the galaxy-sized halo energy spectrum follows closely a Kolmogorov power law, similar to the behaviour of dynamically turbulent processes in fluids. Conclusions. This means that the gravitational clustering of dark matter may admit a turbulent-like representation.