THE VELOCITY WIDTH FUNCTION OF GALAXIES FROM THE 40% ALFALFA SURVEY: SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE COLD DARK MATTER OVERABUNDANCE PROBLEM

By E. Papastergis, Ann M. Martin, R. Giovanelli, M. Haynes. 2011

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ongoing Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey is a wide-area, extragalactic HI-line survey conducted at the Arecibo Observatory. Sources have so far been extracted over ∼3000 deg2 of sky (40% of its final area), resulting in the largest HI-selected sample to date. We measure the space density of HI-bearing galaxies as a function of their observed velocity width (uncorrected for inclination) down to w = 20 km s−1, a factor of two lower than the previous generation HI Parkes All-Sky Survey. We confirm previous results that indicate a substantial discrepancy between the observational distribution and the theoretical one expected in a cold dark matter (CDM) universe, at low widths. In particular, a comparison with synthetic galaxy samples populating state-of-the-art CDM simulations imply a factor of ∼8 difference in the abundance of galaxies with w = 50 km s−1 (increasing to a factor of ∼100 when extrapolated to the ALFALFA limit of w = 20 km s−1). We furthermore identify possible solutions, including a keV warm dark matter scenario and the fact that HI disks in low-mass galaxies are usually not extended enough to probe the full amplitude of the galactic rotation curve. In this latter case, we can statistically infer the relationship between the measured HI rotational velocity of a galaxy and the mass of its host CDM halo. Observational verification of the presented relationship at low velocities would provide an important test of the validity of the established dark matter model.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a58de5096f34278a6b768114dbead2b26ef32685

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Citations in the corpus

Subhaloes in self-interacting galactic dark matter haloes (2012, methodology): “At the same time, the actual number of observed dwarf galaxies in the field (as inferred from the HI ALFALFA survey) seems to be in tension with the large abundance of dwarf haloes predicted by the CDM model (Papastergis et al. 2011; Ferrero et al. 2011).”
Halo and subhalo demographics with Planck cosmological parameters: Bolshoi–Planck and MultiDark–Planck simulations (2016, background): “…circular velocity function (dnh/d log Vmax)—is recognized as a sensitive probe of dark matter (Cole & Kaiser 1989; Shimasaku 1993; Gonzalez et al. 2000; Zavala et al. 2009; Papastergis et al. 2011; Trujillo-Gomez et al. 2011; Schneider et al. 2014; Klypin et al. 2015; Papastergis et al. 2015).”
Cosmological simulations with self-interacting dark matter – II. Halo shapes versus observations (2012, background): “…of tension with the neutralino paradigm on subgalactic scales (Dobler & Keeton 2006; Gentile et al. 2007; de Blok et al. 2008; Kuzio de Naray, McGaugh & de Blok 2008; Kuzio de Naray et al. 2010; Zwaan, Meyer & Staveley-Smith 2010; BoylanKolchin, Bullock & Kaplinghat 2011; Papastergis et al. 2011).”
ETHOS - an effective theory of structure formation: dark matter physics as a possible explanation of the small-scale CDM problems (2015, background): “…in the Milky Way (MW) (Klypin et al. 1999; Moore et al. 1999), and more recently pointed out also for galaxies in the field (Zavala et al. 2009; Papastergis et al. 2011; Klypin et al. 2014), (ii) the “too-big-to-fail (TBTF) problem” (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011; Papastergis et al. 2015) and…”
The Milky Way’s bright satellites as an apparent failure of ΛCDM (2011, unknown): “Papastergis et al. (2011) have shown that while the velocity width function Φw measured from ALFALFA agrees fairly well with ΛCDM predictions for massive galaxies, the observed number counts fall below those predicted by ΛCDM for w .”
WHY BARYONS MATTER: THE KINEMATICS OF DWARF SPHEROIDAL SATELLITES (2012, background): “We leave it to future work to more closely evaluate whether our simulated field dwarf sample matches the velocity function of observed dwarfs (e.g., Papastergis et al. 2011; Ferrero et al. 2012).”
The properties of warm dark matter haloes (2013, background): “…a great deal of attention because it could potentially rule out the existence of CDM. Possibly related problems include the paucity of galaxies in voids (Tikhonov et al. 2009), and the local HI velocity width function (Zavala et al. 2008; Papastergis et al. 2011) (but see Sawala et al. 2013).”
The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey: The ALFALFA Extragalactic H i Source Catalog (2018, methodology): “…al. (2005), the ALFALFA survey design was largely dictated by the principal science goal of determining the faint end of the HI mass function (HIMF), and the overall abundance of low mass gas-rich halos (e.g. Martin et al. 2010; Papastergis et al. 2011; Martin et al. 2012; Papastergis et al. 2013).”
THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY: THE GALAXY POPULATION DETECTED BY ALFALFA (2012, methodology): “Because theα.40 catalog contains HI line widths, we calculate spin parameters from them adopting theVhalo–Vrot relation from Table 1 of Papastergis et al. (2011).”
A DIRECT MEASUREMENT OF THE BARYONIC MASS FUNCTION OF GALAXIES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE GALACTIC BARYON FRACTION (2012, methodology): “…et al. (1988); details of the implementation of the method for HI data can be found in Zwaan et al. (2003, 2005); the specifics of the application of the method on ALFALFA data can be found in Martin et al. (2010), while a shorter qualitative description can be found in Papastergis et al. (2011).”
A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, background): “(c) The local distribution of galaxy rotation velocities (velocity function) predicted by CDM models is characterized by an excess of galaxies in the low-velocity end [440].”
THE CLUSTERING CHARACTERISTICS OF H i-SELECTED GALAXIES FROM THE 40% ALFALFA SURVEY (2012, background): “We will further explore clustering properties of gas-rich galaxies as the focus of future work; Papastergis et al. 2011 (in preparation) are analyzing the dependence of ξ(r) on such properties as galaxy color, gas fraction, luminosity, and HI mass. ALFALFA has a distinct advantage in exploring this…”
Galaxy Masses: A Review (2013, methodology): “The velocity function (or the number of galaxies per unit circular velocity per volume) of spiral galaxies has been measured directly for the Virgo cluster by Papastergis et al. (2011).”
THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY: THE α.40 H i SOURCE CATALOG, ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE DERIVATION OF THE H i MASS FUNCTION (2011, methodology): “The ability of ALFALFA to sample narrower HI line sources is also critical for the derivation of the HI width function and its relation to the halo mass function (Papastergis et al. 2011).”
Is there a "too big to fail" problem in the field? (2014, methodology): “In particular, we use the SDSS counterpart’s photometric axial ratio,b/a, to estimate galactic inclinations through the expression: 2 Note that the contents and layout of this section follow closely the published article of Papastergis et al. (2011).”