Is there a "too big to fail" problem in the field?

By E. Papastergis, R. Giovanelli, M. Haynes, Francesco Shankar Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, Cornell University, U. Southampton. 2014

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use the Arecibo legacy fast ALFA (ALFALFA) 21 cm survey to measure the number density of galaxies as a function of their rotational velocity, Vrot,HI (as inferred from the width of their 21 cm emission line). Based on the measured velocity function we statistically connect galaxies with their host halo, via abundance matching. In a lambda cold dark matter (?CDM) cosmology, dwarf galaxies are expected to be hosted by halos that are significantly more massive than indicated by the measured galactic velocity; if smaller halos were allowed to host galaxies, then ALFALFA would measure a much higher galactic number density. We then seek observational verification of this predicted trend by analyzing the kinematics of a literature sample of gas-rich dwarf galaxies. We find that galaxies with Vrot,HI? 25 km s-1 are kinematically incompatible with their predicted ?CDM host halos, in the sense that hosts are too massive to be accommodated within the measured galactic rotation curves. This issue is analogous to the “too big to fail” problem faced by the bright satellites of the Milky Way, but here it concerns extreme dwarf galaxies in the field. Consequently, solutions based on satellite-specific processes are not applicable in this context. Our result confirms the findings of previous studies based on optical survey data and addresses a number of observational systematics present in these works. Furthermore, we point out the assumptions and uncertainties that could strongly affect our conclusions. We show that the two most important among them – namely baryonic effects on the abundances of halos and on the rotation curves of halos – do not seem capable of resolving the reported discrepancy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/421afecce6a1e10800aac45603d2ee9f92be8299

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Citations in the corpus

Not so lumpy after all: modelling the depletion of dark matter subhaloes by Milky Way-like galaxies (2017, background): “…problem (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011, 2012; see also Tollerud et al. 2014 for similar results for M31 and Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014b; Papastergis et al. 2015 for field dwarf galaxies) may be resolved by internal baryonic processes, such as bursty stellar feedback driving rapid…”
FIRE in the field: Simulating the threshold of galaxy formation (2016, background): “This is the origin of the well-known Cusp/Core (Moore 1994; Flores & Primack 1994), Missing Satellites (Klypin et al. 1999; Moore et al. 1999; Klypin et al. 2015), and Too Big to Fail (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011; Papastergis et al. 2015) problems.”
Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, methodology): “Similar discrepancies were also pointed out for more isolated lowmass galaxies, first based on HI rotation curve data (Ferrero et al. 2012) and subsequently using velocity width measurements (Papastergis et al. 2015; Papastergis & Shankar 2016).”
The Local Group on FIRE: dwarf galaxy populations across a suite of hydrodynamic simulations (2018, background): “…1 Mpc of the MW or M31, but more than 300 kpc from both; Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014b), and TBTF even appears to exist beyond the LG entirely (Papastergis et al. 2015; Papastergis & Shankar 2016): dwarf galaxies (M∗ ∼ 105−7 M ) have less mass within ∼(250 pc)–(1 kpc) than DMO simulations of…”
A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, methodology): “Panel (a): The cumulative velocity function of galaxies measured by the ALFALFA survey (green dotted line; [447]), compared to the cumulative velocity function of haloes in four cosmological models: CDM and WDM with mWDM= 1, 2, & 4 keV (blue, red, orange, and yellow lines respectively; Ref.”
Halo and subhalo demographics with Planck cosmological parameters: Bolshoi–Planck and MultiDark–Planck simulations (2016, methodology): “…circular velocity function (dnh/d log Vmax)—is recognized as a sensitive probe of dark matter (Cole & Kaiser 1989; Shimasaku 1993; Gonzalez et al. 2000; Zavala et al. 2009; Papastergis et al. 2011; Trujillo-Gomez et al. 2011; Schneider et al. 2014; Klypin et al. 2015; Papastergis et al. 2015).”
Forged in FIRE: cusps, cores and baryons in low-mass dwarf galaxies (2015, background): “…into stars (Klypin et al. 1999) and they also must be significantly less dense in their centers than predicted in dissipationless LCDM simulations (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011, 2012; Ferrero et al. 2012; Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014; Tollerud et al. 2014; Klypin et al. 2014; Papastergis et al. 2015).”
ETHOS - an effective theory of structure formation: dark matter physics as a possible explanation of the small-scale CDM problems (2015, background): “…in the field (Zavala et al. 2009; Papastergis et al. 2011; Klypin et al. 2014), (ii) the “too-big-to-fail (TBTF) problem” (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011; Papastergis et al. 2015) and the possibly related diversity of dwarf rotation curves (Oman et al. 2015), (iii) the corecusp (CC) problem for…”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, methodology): “Figure 6: Left: The two counting problems in CDM: the missing satellites problem in the Milky Way [280, 281] (top panel) and “too big to fail in the field” [282] (bottom panel) in their original incarnations in velocity space.”
The impact of baryonic physics on the structure of dark matter haloes: the view from the FIRE cosmological simulations (2015, background): “This seems to be generic problem, independent of the halo formation history as similar effects are also observed in the Local Group and for dwarf galaxies in general (Ferrero et al. 2012; Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014; Papastergis et al. 2015) including non-satellite galaxies.”
Small scale problems of the $\Lambda$CDM model: a short review (2016, background): “However, the TBTF problem also concerns the Local Group, and Local Volume galaxies [305,306,397], galaxies that are too massive to be modified by (reionisation) feedback [35,72,291,301,398–400], contrary to the baryonic solution of Refs.”
Illuminating Low Surface Brightness Galaxies with the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “Therefore, measurements of their number densities and kinematic properties can provide powerful tests of cosmological models (e.g., Ferrero et al. 2012; Papastergis et al. 2015).”