The Luminosity Function of the Milky Way Satellites

By Sergey E. Koposov, V. Belokurov, N. Evans II, Paul Hewett, M. Irwin, G. Gilmore, D. Zucker, Hans-Walter Rix, M. Fellhauer, Eric F. Bell and 9 more. 2007

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We quantify the detectability of stellar Milky Way satellites in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 5. We show that the effective search volumes for the recently discovered SDSS satellites depend strongly on their luminosity, with their maximum distance, Dmax, substantially smaller than the Milky Way halo’s virial radius. Calculating the maximum accessible volume, Vmax, for all faint detected satellites allows the calculation of the luminosity function for Milky Way satellite galaxies, accounting quantitatively for their detectability. We find that the number density of satellite galaxies continues to rise toward low luminosities, but may flatten at MV ∼ − 5; within the uncertainties, the luminosity function can be described by a single power law , spanning luminosities from MV = − 2 all the way to the luminosity of the Large Magellanic Cloud. In comparing these results to several semianalytic galaxy formation models, we find that their predictions differ significantly from the data: either the shape of the luminosity function or the model's surface brightness distribution does not match.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3cfb57f306a1975dbe432260bfcb79d45967e13f

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Citations in the corpus

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The Role of Sterile Neutrinos in Cosmology and Astrophysics (2008, result): “ Namely – the number of dSphs of the Milky Way is still more than an order of magnitude below the CDM predictions, in spite of the drastically improved sensitivity towards the dSph’s search (see e.g. [108, 109]); – direct measurements of DM density proﬁles in dSphs seem to favor cored proﬁles [110–1”
CHEMICAL EVOLUTION IN HIERARCHICAL MODELS OF COSMIC STRUCTURE. II. THE FORMATION OF THE MILKY WAY STELLAR HALO AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE OLDEST STARS (2009, background): “Recent discoveries of many faint dwarf galaxies by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have now provided a measure of the dwarf galaxy luminosity function down to MV ∼ −3 (Tollerud et al. 2008; Koposov et al. 2008).”
A QUANTITATIVE EXPLANATION OF THE OBSERVED POPULATION OF MILKY WAY SATELLITE GALAXIES (2009, methodology): “With proper volume corrections applied, the luminosity function of faint Milky Way satellite galaxies turns out to be a rather shallow power law in the range −15 <MV < −3 (Koposov et al. 2008).”
BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD: DISCOVERY OF NINE ULTRA FAINT SATELLITES IN THE VICINITY OF THE MAGELLANIC CLOUDS (2015, methodology): “…fixed luminosity), and, therefore, significant fraction, but not all of them (as the objects lie very close to the luminosity vs distance limits of Koposov et al. (2008) and Walsh et al. (2009)) would have very likely been identified by the SDSS and the VST ATLAS had they fallen within the…”
THE GHOSTS SURVEY. I. HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE ADVANCED CAMERA FOR SURVEYS DATA (2011, background): “For example, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; York et al. 2000; Adelman-McCarthy et al. 2008) has now more than doubled the number of known dwarf satellite galaxies around our Galaxy (Willman et al. 2005; Zucker et al. 2006; Belokurov et al. 2007a; Koposov et al. 2008; Tollerud et al. 2008).”
Luminosity function and radial distribution of Milky Way satellites in a ΛCDM Universe (2009, methodology): “Koposov et al. (2008) provided the first determination of the volume corrected Milky Way satellite luminosity function down to these extremely faint limits, by assuming various simple radial distribution functions for the satellite population and applying the SDSS detection limits.”
PRE-REIONIZATION FOSSILS, ULTRA-FAINT DWARFS, AND THE MISSING GALACTIC SATELLITE PROBLEM (2008, background): “Identification of new satellites depends on the visibility of the horizontal branch in the color– magnitude diagram, which, for the typical luminosity of the new faint dwarfs (MV ≈ −4) drops below SDSS detection limits at Galactocentric distances beyond ∼ 200–250 kpc (Koposov et al. 2008).”
Mining for Dark Matter Substructure: Inferring Subhalo Population Properties from Strong Lenses with Machine Learning (2019, background): “While the detection of ultrafaint dwarf galaxies through the study of stellar overdensities and kinematics (Koposov et al. 2008, 2015; Bechtol et al. 2015; Drlica-Wagner et al. 2015) can be used to make statements about the underlying dark matter properties, theoretical uncertainties in the…”
BIG FISH, LITTLE FISH: TWO NEW ULTRA-FAINT SATELLITES OF THE MILKY WAY (2010, background): “In each case, there is a visible over-density at the center: Pisces II is detected with significance (Koposov et al. 2008) of ∼ 5 and Segue 3 with significance of ∼ 7.”
The discovery of Segue 2: a prototype of the population of satellites of satellites (2009, background): “In the next panel, the density of resolved stars is shown, and now there is an evident overdensity with significance (Koposov et al. 2008)S = 4.7 at the centre of the image.”
Galactic stellar haloes in the CDM model (2009, background): “Satellites are defined as all galaxies within a radius of 280 kpc from the centre of potential in the principal halo, equivalent to the limiting distance of the Koposov et al. (2008) completenesscorrected observational sample.”
Hierarchical formation of bulgeless galaxies – II. Redistribution of angular momentum via galactic fountains (2011, background): “…meshes well with the need to enrich the IGM (Mac Low & Ferrara 1999; Oppenheimer & Davé 2006; Shen et al. 2010), and also with the observed low baryonic mass fraction of low mass galaxies (e.g. Klypin et al. 1999; Mandelbaum et al. 2006; Koposov et al. 2008; Guo et al. 2010; Moster et al. 2010).”
The properties of satellite galaxies in simulations of galaxy formation (2009, background): “The data of Koposov et al. 2008, which includes the incompleteness-corrected SDSS ultrafaint satellites within 280 kpc from the centre of the Milky Way, are represented by a power-law.”
The number and size of subhalo-induced gaps in stellar streams (2016, background): “This erroneous morphological classification can lead to spurious clumping in stellar density maps induced by the leakage of power from galaxy distributions as illustrated, for example, in Figure 4 of Koposov et al. (2008).”
The properties of warm dark matter haloes (2013, background): “The luminosity function of satellites in the Local Group has now been determined to quite faint magnitudes (Koposov et al. 2008; Tollerud et al. 2008), confirming that there are far fewer satellites around galaxies like the Milky Way than there are subhaloes in cosmological N-body simulations from…”
A lower bound on the mass of dark matter particles (2008, background): “Recently, a number of very faint, very dense dSphs were detected [79, 80, 107–111].”
SAGITTARIUS II, DRACO II AND LAEVENS 3: THREE NEW MILKY WAY SATELLITES DISCOVERED IN THE PAN-STARRS 1 3π SURVEY (2015, methodology): “We further weed out spurious detections, by checking that these over densities do not correspond to significant background galaxy overdensities (Koposov et al. 2008).”