Luminosity function and radial distribution of Milky Way satellites in a ΛCDM Universe

By A. Macciò, X. Kang, F. Fontanot, R. Somerville, Sergey E. Koposov, Pierluigi Monaco Mpia, Heidelberg Space Telescope Science Institute, B. I. O. Astronomy, Cambridge, UK. and 5 more. 2009

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the luminosity function (LF) and the radial distribution of satellite galaxies within Milky Way (MW) sized haloes as predicted in cold dark matter based models of galaxy formation, making use of numericalN-body techniques as well as three different semi-analytic models (SAMs) galaxy formation codes. We extract merger trees from very high-resolution dissipationless simulations of four Galaxy-sized DM haloes, and use these as common input for the SAMs. We present a detailed comparison of our predictions with the observational data recently obtained on the MW satellite LF. We find that SAMs with rather standard astrophysical ingredients are able to reproduce the observed LF over six orders of magnitude in luminosity, down to magnitudes as faint as MV =− 2. We also perform a comparison with the actual observed number of satellites as a function of luminosity, by applying the selection criteria of the SDSS survey to our simulations instead of correcting the observations for incompleteness. Using this approach, we again find good agreement for both the luminosity and radial distributions of MW satellites. We investigate which physical processes in our models are responsible for shaping the predicted satellite LF, and find that tidal destruction, suppression of gas infall by a photoionizing background, and supernova feedback all make important contributions. We conclude that the number and luminosity of MW satellites can be naturally accounted for within the (� )cold dark matter paradigm, and this should no longer be considered a problem.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/60eec3bfc8a3c3321c79084e0d6457dd38a84ab8

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, methodology): “A combination of supernovae feedback, reionization and ram-pressure stripping is sufficient to fully explain the observed distribution assuming pure CDM [709, 1001, 800].”
The Dark Matter Crisis: Falsification of the Current Standard Model of Cosmology (2012, unknown): “…Kang & Moore (2009); Koposov et al. (2009); Okamoto& Frenk (2009); Kirby et al. (2009); Shaya et al. (2009); Busha et al. (2010); Primack (2009); Macciò & Fontanot (2010); Macciò et al. (2010); Cooper et al. (2010); Deason et al. (2011); Nichols & BlandHawthorn (2011); Font et al. (2011).”
Cores in warm dark matter haloes: a Catch 22 problem (2012, methodology): “Finally, in predicting the core size for satellite galaxies in the MW halo, it must be taken into account that due to stripping and tidal forces satellites can lose significant mass after accreting into larger haloes (e.g. Penarrubia et al. 2008; Macciò et al. 2010).”
The current status of galaxy formation (2012, background): “It is argued that SN feedback solves the problem for the more massive dwarfs (Macciò et al., 2010).”
THE NON-CAUSAL ORIGIN OF THE BLACK-HOLE–GALAXY SCALING RELATIONS (2010, background): “1 shows that the hierarchical formation of galaxies 2 We picked this mass since at lower masses halos likely did/do not form stars at all (Macciò et al. 2010).”
The stellar mass-halo mass relation of isolated field dwarfs : a critical test of ΛCDM at the edge of galaxy formation (2016, background): “However, more sophisticated mappings MNRAS 000, 000–000 (0000) between dark and luminous subhalos that take account of the radial or orbit distribution of satellites could still work (e.g. Macciò et al. 2010; Lux et al. 2010; Anderhalden et al. 2013).”
Cosmic Dawn (CoDa): the first radiation-hydrodynamics simulation of reionization and galaxy formation in the Local Universe (2015, methodology): “In this framework, a number of semi-analytical models (hereafter SAMs) have been shown to reproduce well the satellite population of the Milky Way (hereafter MW), such as Koposov et al. (2009); Muñoz et al. (2009); Busha et al. (2010); Macciò et al. (2010); Li et al. (2010); Font et al. (2011).”
ACCURATE STELLAR KINEMATICS AT FAINT MAGNITUDES: APPLICATION TO THE BOÖTES I DWARF SPHEROIDAL GALAXY (2011, background): “…efforts have been expended in simulating dwarf galaxy formation (Barkana & Loeb 1999; Somerville 2002; Benson et al. 2003; Ricotti 2010), attempting to lessen the tension between predictions from simulations and the observations (Koposov et al. 2009; Macciò et al. 2010; Cooper et al. 2010).”
The missing massive satellites of the Milky Way (2012, background): “…the relatively small number of subhalos massive enough to host luminous galaxies (see, e.g., Kauffmann et al. 1993; Bullock et al. 2000; Benson et al. 2002; Somerville ⋆ Email: jie.wang@durham.ac.uk 2002; Cooper et al. 2010; Li et al. 2010; Macciò et al. 2010; Guo et al. 2011; Font et al. 2011).”
The Milky Way’s bright satellites as an apparent failure of ΛCDM (2011, background): “…models of galaxy formation have shown that supernova feedback and reionization should indeed strongly limit the formation of stars in low-mass halos since z ≈ 6 (Benson et al. 2002; Koposov et al. 2009; Muñoz et al. 2009; Li et al. 2010; Macciò et al. 2010; Guo et al. 2011; Font et al. 2011).”
The upper bound on the lowest mass halo (2016, methodology): “To capture the physics of star formation in low mass halos, we do not resort to semi-analytic modeling as presented in e.g. Macciò et al. (2010) or Font et al. (2011) but instead test a range of Stellar-Mass-Halo-Mass (SMHM) relations with varying degree of sophistication.”
Local-Group tests of dark-matter concordance cosmology - Towards a new paradigm for structure formation (2010, methodology): “Filling the multitude of DM halos with baryons given the above combined processes was investigated by Macciò et al. (2010).”