An accurate measure of the size of dark matter haloes using the size of galaxies

¹ Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, C/ Vía Láctea s/n, 38205 La Laguna, Spain
² Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna, Av. del Astrofísico Francisco Sánchez s/n, 38206 La Laguna, Spain

^★ Corresponding author: claudio.dalla.vecchia@iac.es

Received: 28 July 2025
Accepted: 17 October 2025

Abstract

The physically motivated definition of galaxy size proposed recently, linked to the farther location of the in situ star formation, considerably reduces the scatter of the galaxy mass–size relation and provides a viable method to infer the galaxy stellar mass from its size. We provide a similar relation correlating the size of galaxies with the size of their dark matter haloes by leveraging the small scatter of the aforementioned relation. We analysed the simulated galaxies of the two main cosmological volumes of the EAGLE simulations and computed the size of the galaxies and their mass when mimicking the observational analysis. For central galaxies, we computed the relation between galaxy size and halo size. We show that the simulated galaxies reproduce the observed stellar mass–size relation’s normalisation and slope. The scatter of this relation, 0.06 dex, matches the intrinsic scatter measured in observation. We then computed the correlation between galaxy size and halo size and found that the relation is steeper than when using the half-mass radius as a measure of size, with the scatter (0.1 dex) being a factor of two smaller than the observed relation. As well, the galaxy-to-halo mass relation derived from the simulations provides a factor of two better scatter than the observed scatter. This opens the possibility of measuring the size of dark matter haloes with greater accuracy (less than 50%, i.e. around six times better than using the effective radius) by using only deep imaging data.