RECONCILING DWARF GALAXIES WITH ΛCDM COSMOLOGY: SIMULATING A REALISTIC POPULATION OF SATELLITES AROUND A MILKY WAY–MASS GALAXY

By Andrew Wetzel, P. Hopkins, Ji-hoon Kim, C. Faucher-Giguére, D. Keres̆, E. Quataert. 2016

319 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Low-mass “dwarf” galaxies represent the most significant challenges to the cold dark matter (CDM) model of cosmological structure formation. Because these faint galaxies are (best) observed within the Local Group (LG) of the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31), understanding their formation in such an environment is critical. We present first results from the Latte Project: the Milky Way on Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE). This simulation models the formation of an MW-mass galaxy to z = 0 within ΛCDM cosmology, including dark matter, gas, and stars at unprecedented resolution: baryon particle mass of 7070 M ⊙ with gas kernel/softening that adapts down to 1 pc (with a median of 25 – 60 pc at z = 0 ). Latte was simulated using the GIZMO code with a mesh-free method for accurate hydrodynamics and the FIRE-2 model for star formation and explicit feedback within a multi-phase interstellar medium. For the first time, Latte self-consistently resolves the spatial scales corresponding to half-light radii of dwarf galaxies that form around an MW-mass host down to M star ≳ 10 5 M ⊙ . Latte’s population of dwarf galaxies agrees with the LG across a broad range of properties: (1) distributions of stellar masses and stellar velocity dispersions (dynamical masses), including their joint relation; (2) the mass–metallicity relation; and (3) diverse range of star formation histories, including their mass dependence. Thus, Latte produces a realistic population of dwarf galaxies at M star ≳ 10 5 M ⊙ that does not suffer from the “missing satellites” or “too big to fail” problems of small-scale structure formation. We conclude that baryonic physics can reconcile observed dwarf galaxies with standard ΛCDM cosmology.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/271f9c6087ad45da76ca3853b02e7caea6e280c9

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Citations in the corpus

Quenching and ram pressure stripping of simulated Milky Way satellite galaxies (2017, background): “…have typically focused either on one to a few high resolution cosmological models with gas physics (Okamoto et al. 2010; Zolotov et al. 2012; Wetzel et al. 2016) or have focused on a large suite of dark matter only models that better probe cosmic variance, but do not include the effects of…”
Milky Way Satellite Census. I. The Observational Selection Function for Milky Way Satellites in DES Y3 and Pan-STARRS DR1 (2019, methodology): “…simulations that self-consistently model galaxy formation in a cosmological context produce luminosity functions and radial distributions of satellites that are broadly consistent with observations of the Milky Way system (e.g., Wetzel et al. 2016; Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2019; Samuel et al. 2020).”
FIRE-2 simulations: physics versus numerics in galaxy formation (2017, methodology): “As with FIRE-1, all runs denoted as “FIRE-2” here or in any other papers (e.g. Wetzel et al. 2016; Su et al. 2017; Fitts et al. 2017) use the identical source code and physical parameters, unless explicitly labeled otherwise for comparison purposes.”
Simulating galaxy formation with the IllustrisTNG model (2017, background): “…of individual galaxies at even higher resolutions (e.g. Guedes et al. 2011; Stinson et al. 2013; Hopkins et al. 2014; Wang et al. 2015; Grand et al. 2017; Agertz & Kravtsov 2016; Wetzel et al. 2016), these calculations have provided new insights into the processes underpinning galaxy formation.”
Predicting the LISA white dwarf binary population in the Milky Way with cosmological simulations (2019, methodology): “The Milky Way model comes from a cosmological simulation, taken from the FIRE simulation suite, and provides a self-consistent model for star formation which naturally includes all the different galactic components.”
Target Selection for the SDSS-IV APOGEE-2 Survey (2017, methodology): “This is a factor of several larger than the resolution achievable with current MHD simulations of L∗ galaxies (∼1–50 pc; e.g., Wetzel et al. 2016; Hopkins et al. 2017).”
The Local Group on FIRE: dwarf galaxy populations across a suite of hydrodynamic simulations (2018, methodology): “Our approach is similar to Wetzel et al. (2016), but we base our galaxy catalogues on AHF halo catalogues (rather than rockstar; Behroozi, Wechsler & Wu 2013) and the cuts placed on stellar particles vary slightly; most notably, Wetzel et al. (2016) did not include either our initial cut based on…”
New Constraints on the free-streaming of warm dark matter from intermediate and small scale Lyman-$\alpha$ forest data (2017, background): “However, apart from changing the nature of the DM several studies have shown that baryonic physics could help in alleviating or even solving the small scale tensions [27, 28].”
The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic, and Integrated Properties (2016, background): “…with the most advanced prescriptions for feedback (e.g., the Feedback in Realistic Environments or FIRE project, Hopkins et al. 2014) are providing new insight on why only a small fraction of the dark minihalos in orbit about the Galaxy are visible as dwarf galaxies (Wetzel et al. 2016).”
Hunting for the Dark Matter Wake Induced by the Large Magellanic Cloud (2019, methodology): “Recently, Cunningham et al. (2018) studied the impact of substructure on β using two of the Latte FIRE-2 (Wetzel et al. 2016) cosmological simulations.”
The biggest splash (2019, background): “The Latte project (Wetzel et al. 2016) is a suite of ∼10 hydrodynamical simulations of MW mass galaxies.”
Black holes on FIRE: stellar feedback limits early feeding of galactic nuclei (2017, background): “…from https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article-abstract/472/1/L109/4349744 by California Institute of Technology user on 26 July 2018 simulation suite (Wetzel et al. 2016) at three different resolution levels (mb = [7, 56, 450] × 103 M ) for numerical convergence tests (these runs do not include…”
Characterization of subhalo structural properties and implications for dark matter annihilation signals (2016, background): “It is unclear at the moment the role that baryons might have in this context (see, e.g., the recent works by Fiacconi et al. (2016); Wetzel et al. (2016)), and in particular their impact on the substructure boost values.”
MUFASA: Galaxy Formation Simulations With Meshless Hydrodynamics (2016, result): “Nonetheless, in idealised test cases, MFM handles discontinuities and shear flows in a more realistic manner than SPH (Hopkins 2015), which is consistent with results in more realistic circumstances (Wetzel et al. 2016).”
FIRE in the field: Simulating the threshold of galaxy formation (2016, methodology): “For example, Zolotov et al. (2012), the APOSTLE simulations (Sawala et al. 2016), and the Latte simulation (Wetzel et al. 2016) all find agreement with various observed properties of Local Group satellite galaxies, yet APOSTLE galaxies do not form cores while galaxies in Zolotov et al. (2012) and…”
Not so lumpy after all: modelling the depletion of dark matter subhaloes by Milky Way-like galaxies (2017, methodology): “The physics and numerical prescriptions are therefore given in Wetzel et al. (2016).”