The stability of stellar discs in Milky Way-sized dark matter haloes

We employ an improved methodology to insert live stellar discs into high-resolution dark matter simulations of Milky Way-sized haloes, allowing us to investigate the fate of thin stellar discs in the tumultuous environment of cold dark matter structures. We study a set of eight different haloes, drawn from the Aquarius simulation project, in which stellar discs are adiabatically grown with a prescribed structure, and then allowed to self-consistently evolve. The initial velocity distribution is set-up in very good equilibrium with the help of the GALIC code. We find that the residual triaxiality of the haloes leads to significant disc tumbling, qualitatively confirming earlier work. We show that the disc turning motion is unaffected by structural properties of the galaxies such as the presence or absence of a bulge or bar. In typical Milky Way-sized dark matter haloes, we expect an average turning of the discs by about 40°between z = 1 and 0, over the course of 7.6 Gyr. We also investigate the impact of the discs on substructures, and conversely, the disc heating rate caused by the dark matter halo substructures. The presence of discs reduces the central subhalo abundance by a about a factor of 2, due to an increased evaporation rate by gravitational shocks from disc passages. We find that substructures are important for heating the outer parts of stellar discs but do not appear to significantly affect their inner parts.