Too big to fail in the Local Group

By S. Garrison-Kimmel, M. Boylan-Kolchin, James S. Bullock, E. Kirby. 2014

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We compare the dynamical masses of dwarf galaxies in the Local Group (LG) to the predicted masses of halos in the ELVIS suite of $\Lambda$CDM simulations, a sample of 48 Galaxy-size hosts, 24 of which are in paired configuration similar to the LG. We enumerate unaccounted-for dense halos ($V_\mathrm{max} \gtrsim 25$ km s$^{-1}$) in these volumes that at some point in their histories were massive enough to have formed stars in the presence of an ionizing background ($V_\mathrm{peak} > 30$ km s$^{-1}$). Within 300 kpc of the Milky Way, the number of unaccounted-for massive halos ranges from 2 - 25 over our full sample. Moreover, this "too big to fail" count grows as we extend our comparison to the outer regions of the Local Group: within 1.2 Mpc of either giant we find that there are 12-40 unaccounted-for massive halos. This count excludes volumes within 300 kpc of both the MW and M31, and thus should be largely unaffected by any baryonically-induced environmental processes. According to abundance matching -- specifically abundance matching that reproduces the Local Group stellar mass function -- all of these missing massive systems should have been quite bright, with $M_\star > 10^6M_\odot$. Finally, we use the predicted density structure of outer LG dark matter halos together with observed dwarf galaxy masses to derive an $M_\star-V_\mathrm{max}$ relation for LG galaxies that are outside the virial regions of either giant. We find that there is no obvious trend in the relation over three orders of magnitude in stellar mass (a "common mass" relation), from $M_\star \sim 10^8 - 10^5 M_\odot$, in drastic conflict with the tight relation expected for halos that are unaffected by reionization. Solutions to the too big to fail problem that rely on ram pressure stripping, tidal effects, or statistical flukes appear less likely in the face of these results.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d05cdd495074c5abb03b66986e8c8ead0e7628e

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Citations in the corpus

Forged in FIRE: cusps, cores and baryons in low-mass dwarf galaxies (2015, background): “…mass - halo mass relation for the four hydrodynamical runs described above (large red points) compared to the most recent estimates for this relation from abundancematching exercises in the Local Group (Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014; Brook et al. 2014, black solid and dashed lines respectively).”
The stellar mass-halo mass relation of isolated field dwarfs : a critical test of ΛCDM at the edge of galaxy formation (2016, background): “Indeed, in Appendix C we verify that our RT05 M∗ −M200|abund relation, derived in this way, agrees very well with those derived independently by Brook et al. 2014 and Garrison-Kimmel et al. (2014).”
A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, background): “Satellite populations of the Andromeda Galaxy and the field of the Local Group also exhibit a dearth of massive satellites expected from collisionless DM-only simulations [137, 138].”
The Dawn of FIMP Dark Matter: A Review of Models and Constraints (2017, unknown): “core’ [162–167] and the ‘too-big-to-fail’ [168, 169] problems.”
Core formation in dwarf haloes with self-interacting dark matter: no fine-tuning necessary (2014, background): “We have excluded Tucana, which has an implied central density so high that it is hard to understand even in the context of CDM (see Garrison-Kimmel et al., 2014b, for a discussion).”
Is there a "too big to fail" problem in the field? (2014, methodology): “In addition, the AM procedure in Ferrero et al. is performed on the basis of stellar mass, as is the case in all previous works assessing the TBTF problem (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011; Tollerud et al. 2014; Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014).”
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.”
The Local Group on FIRE: dwarf galaxy populations across a suite of hydrodynamic simulations (2018, methodology): “As expected from Garrison-Kimmel et al. (2014a), the satellite SMFs (host distance rhost < 300 kpc) of the isolated and paired haloes overlap well.”
Disruption of Dark Matter Substructure: Fact or Fiction? (2017, background): “The latter has given rise to a potential problem for the ΛCDM paradigm in the form of the ‘too-big-to-fail’ problem (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2010, 2011; Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014; Ogiya & Burkert 2015), which has sparked renewed interest in alternatives such as WDM © 2013 The Authors or SIDM…”
The SAGA Survey. I. Satellite Galaxy Populations around Eight Milky Way Analogs (2017, methodology): “We will investigate the influence of a M 31 companion on satellite distributions as our survey size increases, although numerical simulations suggest this may be a small affect on the subhalo population (Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014b).”
A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, result): “Furthermore, [522] compared the stellar kinematics of the Kirby et al.”
RECONCILING DWARF GALAXIES WITH ΛCDM COSMOLOGY: SIMULATING A REALISTIC POPULATION OF SATELLITES AROUND A MILKY WAY–MASS GALAXY (2016, methodology): “This result is equally important, because isolated low-mass halos in dark-matter-only simulations also suffer from a “too big to fail” problem (Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014).”
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.”
Not so lumpy after all: modelling the depletion of dark matter subhaloes by Milky Way-like galaxies (2017, background): “…beyond the virial radius of a more massive host that orbited within the virial radius in the past; e.g. Teyssier et al. 2012; Wetzel et al. 2014; Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014a) that have passed close to the central galaxy should be drastically reduced, though the number that have had only…”
Production regimes for Self-Interacting Dark Matter (2015, unknown): “core’ [4–7] and the ‘too-big-to-fail’ [8, 9] problems.”