Hundreds of Milky Way Satellites? Luminosity Bias in the Satellite Luminosity Function

By Erik J. Tollerud, James S. Bullock, L. Strigari, B. Willman. 2008

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We correct the observed Milky Way satellite luminosity function for luminosity bias using published completeness limits for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR5. Assuming that the spatial distribution of Milky Way satellites tracks the subhalos found in the Via Lactea ΛCDM N-body simulation, we show that there should be between ~300 and ~600 satellites within 400 kpc of the Sun that are brighter than the faintest known dwarf galaxies and that there may be as many as ~1000, depending on assumptions. By taking into account completeness limits, we show that the radial distribution of known Milky Way dwarfs is consistent with our assumption that the full satellite population tracks that of subhalos. These results alleviate the primary worries associated with the so-called missing satellites problem in CDM. We show that future, deep wide-field surveys such as SkyMapper, the Dark Energy Survey (DES), PanSTARRS, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will deliver a complete census of ultrafaint dwarf satellites out to the Milky Way virial radius, offer new limits on the free-streaming scale of dark matter, and provide unprecedented constraints on the low-luminosity threshold of galaxy formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52ac9199d8c665be99c459706d62a2ccd61ae10a

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Citations in the corpus

Quantifying the heart of darkness with GHALO – a multibillion particle simulation of a galactic halo (2008, background): “The completeness of current surveys is debated, and it has been argued that many hundreds of additional systems may be found in the coming years (Tollerud et al. 2008).”
HIGH-RESOLUTION SPECTROSCOPY OF EXTREMELY METAL-POOR STARS IN THE LEAST EVOLVED GALAXIES: URSA MAJOR II and COMA BERENICES (2009, background): “Current estimates are that the Milky Way’s satellite population today includes ∼ 5 times as many ultra-faint dwarf galaxies as classical dSphs (Simon & Geha 2007; Koposov 2008; Tollerud et al. 2008).”
WHY BARYONS MATTER: THE KINEMATICS OF DWARF SPHEROIDAL SATELLITES (2012, background): “This neglects just over half of the subhalos that we have identified with vmax(z = 0) > 15km/s and within 300 kpc, because they are fainter than MV = −8 where the observational data is incomplete (Tollerud et al. 2008; Walsh et al. 2009).”
Galactic stellar haloes in the CDM model (2009, background): “Recent discoveries of faint dwarf satellites and an improved understanding of the completeness of the Milky Way sample (Koposov et al. 2008; Tollerud et al. 2008, and referenes therein) have reduced the deficit of observed satellites to the point of qualitative agreement with the prediction of the…”
A BARYONIC SOLUTION TO THE MISSING SATELLITES PROBLEM (2012, background): “It is also important to consider the number of faint satellites that remain undetected due to observational incompleteness (Willman et al. 2004; Simon & Geha 2007; Tollerud et al. 2008; Walsh et al. 2009; Koposov et al. 2009; Rashkov et al. 2012).”
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).”
Dark Matter Searches with Astroparticle Data (2011, result): “But that number is small compared to the hundreds predicted by simulations (Klypin et al., 1999; Tollerud et al., 2008).”
PRE-REIONIZATION FOSSILS, ULTRA-FAINT DWARFS, AND THE MISSING GALACTIC SATELLITE PROBLEM (2008, methodology): “To account for this, we apply the zeroth-order correction of multiplying the number of new dwarfs by 5.15 (Tollerud et al. 2008).”
SAGITTARIUS II, DRACO II AND LAEVENS 3: THREE NEW MILKY WAY SATELLITES DISCOVERED IN THE PAN-STARRS 1 3π SURVEY (2015, background): “The recent discoveries of such faint candidate DGs out to ∼ 70 kpc within DES confirm that they are in fact common and that they could indeed correspond to the large population of faint dark-matter dominated systems expected to inhabit the MW halo (e.g. Tollerud et al. 2008; Bullock et al. 2010).”
There's no place like home? Statistics of Milky Way-mass dark matter haloes (2009, background): “The resolution of this discrepancy likely lies in the strong dependence of galaxy formation physics on Macc (see Kravtsov 2010 for a recent review) combined with the limited sky coverage and the surface brightness detection threshold of the SDSS (Tollerud et al. 2008; Walsh et al. 2009).”
Galaxy formation theory (2010, background): “Recent estimates of the total number of dwarf satellites in theMilky Way’s halo alone are of the order a few hundred (Tollerud et al. 2008).”
Galactic Searches for Dark Matter (2012, background): “…to predict how many ultra-faint satellites will be detected in these surveys, only a very small fraction of the total Milky Way volume has been surveyed to the SDSS depth, so there is certainly a vast amount of discovery space available (Koposov et al., 2008; Tollerud et al., 2008; Willman, 2010).”
Cuspy No More: How Outflows Affect the Central Dark Matter and Baryon Distribution in Lambda CDM Galaxies (2012, background): “This sets an interesting scale (Willman et al. 2005; Tollerud et al. 2008) where primordial cuspy profiles would still be observable.”
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…”
CLUMPY STREAMS FROM CLUMPY HALOS: DETECTING MISSING SATELLITES WITH COLD STELLAR STRUCTURES (2010, background): “This discrepancy can partially be explained by accounting for the the incomplete sky-coverage of SDSS and the distancedependent limit on this survey’s sensitivity to low-surface brightness objects (Koposov et al. 2008; Tollerud et al. 2008).”
SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER ANNIHILATION IN RECENTLY DISCOVERED MILKY WAY SATELLITES WITH FERMI-LAT (2016, background): “In particular, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (Ivezic et al. 2008) is expected to find hundreds of new Milky Way satellite galaxies (Tollerud et al. 2008; Hargis et al. 2014).”