The chosen few: the low-mass haloes that host faint galaxies

By T. Sawala, Carlos S. Frenk, Azadeh Fattahi, J. Navarro, Tom Theuns, Richard G. Bower, Robert A. Crain, Michelle Furlong, Adrian Jenkins, Matthieu Schaller and 8 more. 2014

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since reionization prevents star formation in most halos below 3 x 10^9 solar masses, dwarf galaxies only populate a fraction of existing dark matter halos. We use hydrodynamic cosmological simulations of the Local Group to study the discriminating factors for galaxy formation in the early Universe and connect them to the present-day properties of galaxies and halos. A combination of selection effects related to reionization, and the subsequent evolution of halos in different environments, introduces strong biases between the population of halos that host dwarf galaxies, and the total halo population. Halos that host galaxies formed earlier and are more concentrated. In addition, halos more affected by tidal stripping are more likely to host a galaxy for a given mass or maximum circular velocity, vmax, today. Consequently, satellite halos are populated more frequently than field halos, and satellite halos of 10^8 - 10^9 solar masses or vmax of 12 - 20 km/s, similar to the Local Group dwarf spheroidals, have experienced a greater than average reduction in both mass and vmax after infall. They are on closer, more radial orbits with higher infall velocities and earlier infall times. Together, these effects make dwarf galaxies highly biased tracers of the underlying dark matter distribution.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4edab687bbb26d31417ca14a3e829a5f99c833ae

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

The stellar mass-halo mass relation of isolated field dwarfs : a critical test of ΛCDM at the edge of galaxy formation (2016, background): “In Read et al. 1 Two recent studies have claimed that dark matter cores do not form at any mass scale (Sawala et al. 2016b; Zhu et al. 2016).”
The APOSTLE project: Local Group kinematic mass constraints and simulation candidate selection (2015, methodology): “…(which we shall hereafter refer to as APOSTLE, a shorthand for ‘A Project Of Simulating The Local Environment’), which uses the same code developed for the EAGLE simulations (Crain et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015), have already been reported in Sawala et al. (2015, 2016) and Oman et al. (2015).”
The Local Group on FIRE: dwarf galaxy populations across a suite of hydrodynamic simulations (2018, methodology): “6 of Sawala et al. (2016b) and fig.”
The APOSTLE simulations: solutions to the Local Group's cosmic puzzles (2015, background): “…s−1, where some haloes remain dark, those satellite haloes that host galaxies similar to the MW dwarf spheroidals have typically experienced much more severe tidal stripping, with a resulting reduction in mass or vmax greater than expected for typical haloes of the same mass (Sawala et al. 2016).”
Quenching and ram pressure stripping of simulated Milky Way satellite galaxies (2017, methodology): “An exception is the APOSTLE simulations, a set of 12 cosmological zoom simulations of Local Group-like volumes (Fattahi et al. 2016; Sawala et al. 2016a,b).”
The milky way total mass profile as inferred from Gaia DR2 (2019, methodology): “APOSTLE is a suite of 12 pairs of MW-mass haloes selected to resemble the Local Group in terms of mass, separation, relative velocity and local environment (Fattahi et al. 2016; Sawala et al. 2016a).”
Small scale problems of the $\Lambda$CDM model: a short review (2016, methodology): “[71] claimed a resolution in the EAGLE hydrodynamical simulations, the review [72] concluded oppositely.”
The upper bound on the lowest mass halo (2016, methodology): “Secondly, we consider Sawala et al. (2016), whose hydrodynamic, cosmological simulations additionally include sub-grid physics modules (Schaye et al. 2015; Crain et al. 2015) which allow for treatment of physical processes occurring below the resolution limit, e.g. star formation.”