Scaling relations and the fundamental line of the local group dwarf galaxies

By J. Woo, S. Courteau, A. Dekel. 2008

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the scaling relations between global properties of dwarf galaxies in the local group. In addition to quantifying the correlations between pairs of variables, we explore the 'shape' of the distribution of galaxies in log parameter space using standardized principal component analysis, the analysis is performed first in the 3D structural parameter space of stellar mass M * , internal velocity V and characteristic radius R* (or surface brightness μ*). It is then extended to a 4D space that includes a stellar population parameter such as metallicity Z or star formation rate M * . We find that the local group dwarfs basically define a one-parameter 'fundamental line' (FL), primarily driven by stellar mass, M * . A more detailed inspection reveals differences between the star formation properties of dwarf irregulars (dl's) and dwarf ellipticals (dE's), beyond the tendency of the latter to be more massive. In particular, the metallicities of dl's are typically lower by a factor of 3 at a given M * and they grow faster with increasing M * , showing a tighter FL in the 4D space for the dE's. The structural scaling relations of dl's resemble those of the more massive spirals, but the dl's have lower star formation rates for a given M. which also grow faster with increasing M * . On the other hand, the FL of the dE's departs from the fundamental plane of bigger ellipticals. While the one-parameter nature of the FL and the associated slopes of the scaling relations are consistent with the general predictions of supernova feedback from Dekel & Woo, the differences between the FL's of the dE's and the dl's remain a challenge and should serve as a guide for the secondary physical processes responsible for these two types.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/738be9cb814fa55b35532ae61d456babc3559d6f

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Citations in the corpus

ELVIS: Exploring the Local Volume in Simulations (2013, methodology): “For the galaxy stellar mass functions, we use the masses from Woo et al. (2008), where available, and the luminosity data cataloged in McConnachie (2012), assuming M?”
A BUDGET AND ACCOUNTING OF METALS AT z ∼ 0: RESULTS FROM THE COS-HALOS SURVEY (2013, background): “Peeples & Somerville (2013) showed that this simple approach for modeling galaxy metallicity histories reproduces the z = 0 stellar metallicities as measured by Gallazzi et al. (2005) and Woo et al. (2008) rather well.”
MODELING THE METALLICITY DISTRIBUTION OF GLOBULAR CLUSTERS (2010, methodology): “We adopt the same redshift dependence for our local relation, while using the shallower slope derived from Woo et al. (2008) because it deals with a population of halos in the mass range corresponding to the Milky Way progenitors.”
THE ACS NEARBY GALAXY SURVEY TREASURY. VIII. THE GLOBAL STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF 60 DWARF GALAXIES IN THE LOCAL VOLUME (2011, background): “Several feedback models can reproduce observed dwarf galaxy relationships between mass, luminosity, and rotational velocities (e.g., Dekel & Silk 1986; Dekel & Woo 2003; Woo et al. 2008).”
Formation of isolated dwarf galaxies with feedback (2009, background): “They may explain some of the peculiar properties of dwarf spheroidals, including their very high mass-to-light ratios, and may also be responsible for the observed scaling laws (e.g. Woo et al. 2008).”
Feedback-regulated star formation and escape of LyC photons from mini-haloes during reionization (2016, methodology): “Our simulated galaxies are slightly more metal-poor (roughly a factor of two) than the local dwarf population (Woo et al. 2008).”
THE COS-DWARFS SURVEY: THE CARBON RESERVOIR AROUND SUB-L* GALAXIES (2014, background): “If these galaxies lie on the stellar metallicity relation (Woo et al. 2008), the mean trend of gas fractions, and the gas-phase mass-metallicity relation (Peeples et al. 2014)for low-z galaxies, then they have interstellar carbon masses of MCISM = 1.6× 10 5 to 5× 106 M⊙ and masses ofMCstar = 104 to…”
MULTI-ELEMENT ABUNDANCE MEASUREMENTS FROM MEDIUM-RESOLUTION SPECTRA. III. METALLICITY DISTRIBUTIONS OF MILKY WAY DWARF SATELLITE GALAXIES (2010, background): “Others have studied the more basic relation—the fundamental line— for dwarf galaxies (Prada & Burkert 2002; Woo et al. 2008).”
The Local Group on FIRE: dwarf galaxy populations across a suite of hydrodynamic simulations (2018, background): “It is also qualitatively independent of the assumed mass-to-light ratio for the observed dwarf galaxies: even adopting a stellar mass-to-light ratio of unity for the galaxies not included in Woo et al. (2008) yields a mean of 61 per cent as many satellites as M31 with M∗ = 105 M .”
THE UNIVERSAL STELLAR MASS–STELLAR METALLICITY RELATION FOR DWARF GALAXIES (2013, background): “The massto-light ratio depends on the SFH. Woo et al. (2008) calculated M∗/LV for the brighter MW dSphs and the LG dIrrs in two ways.”
Star formation in semi-analytic galaxy formation models with multiphase gas (2015, result): “Our models naturally predict a slope for the stellar MZR that is in fairly good agreement with observations (Woo et al. 2008; Kirby et al. 2013) down to very low stellar masses (mstar ∼ 10 7M⊙).”