The stellar mass-halo mass relation of isolated field dwarfs : a critical test of ΛCDM at the edge of galaxy formation

By Justin I. Read, G. Iorio, O. Agertz, Filippo Fraternali. 2016

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We fit the rotation curves of isolated dwarf galaxies to directly measure the stellar mass-halo mass relation (M*-M200) over the mass range 5 × 105 ≲ M*/M⊙ ≲ 108. By accounting for cusp-core transformations due to stellar feedback, we find a monotonic relation with little scatter. Such monotonicity implies that abundance matching should yield a similar M*- M200 if the cosmological model is correct. Using the 'field galaxy' stellar mass function from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the halo mass function from the Λ cold dark matter Bolshoi simulation, we find remarkable agreement between the two. This holds down to M200 ~ 5 × 109 M⊙, and to M200 ~ 5 × 108 M⊙ if we assume a power-law extrapolation of the SDSS stellar mass function below M* ~ 107 M⊙. However, if instead of SDSS we use the stellar mass function of nearby galaxy groups, then the agreement is poor. This occurs because the group stellar mass function is shallower than that of the field below M* ~ 109 M⊙, recovering the familiar 'missing satellites' and 'too big to fail' problems. Our result demonstrates that both problems are confined to group environments and must, therefore, owe to 'galaxy formation physics' rather than exotic cosmology. Finally, we repeat our analysis for aΛWarm Dark Matter cosmology, finding that it fails at 68 per cent confidence for a thermal relic mass of mWDM < 1.25 keV, and mWDM < 2 keV if we use the power-law extrapolation of SDSS. We conclude by making a number of predictions for future surveys based on these results. (Less)

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7470ee895f407db2b70d270926e9d0aff2a3467b

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Citations in the corpus

The SPHINX Cosmological Simulations of the First Billion Years: the Impact of Binary Stars on Reionization★ (2018, methodology): “We include the local Universe observations from Read et al. (2017) and the z = 6 relation derived by Behroozi et al. (2013).”
Dark matter heats up in dwarf galaxies (2018, methodology): “This differs from the analysis in Read et al. (2016b, 2017) where we used instead the ‘CORENFW’ profile from Read et al. (2016a).”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “1) found in hydrodynamic + CDM simulations [326, 142, 401] shows good agreement”
The SAGA Survey. I. Satellite Galaxy Populations around Eight Milky Way Analogs (2017, methodology): “Our model is abundance matched to the GAMA global luminosity function, which may differ from the satellite luminosity function of individual host galaxies (e.g., Read et al. 2017).”
Mining for Dark Matter Substructure: Inferring Subhalo Population Properties from Strong Lenses with Machine Learning (2019, background): “Furthermore, suppressed star formation in smaller halos means that there exists a threshold ( (cid:46) 10 8 M ) below which subhalos are expected to be mostly dark and devoid of baryonic activity (Efstathiou 1992; Fitts et al. 2017; Read et al. 2017).”