ELVIS: Exploring the Local Volume in Simulations

By S. Garrison-Kimmel, M. Boylan-Kolchin, James S. Bullock, Kyle Lee. 2013

260 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce a set of high-resolution dissipationless simulations that model the Local Group (LG) in a cosmological context: Exploring the Local Volume in Simulations (ELVIS). The suite contains 48 Galaxy-size haloes, each within high-resolution volumes that span 2–5 Mpc in size, and each resolving thousands of systems with masses below the atomic cooling limit. Half of the ELVIS galaxy haloes are in paired configurations similar to the Milky Way (MW) and M31; the other half are isolated, mass-matched analogues. We find no difference in the abundance or kinematics of substructure within the virial radii of isolated versus paired hosts. On Mpc scales, however, LG-like pairs average almost twice as many companions and the velocity field is kinematically hotter and more complex. We present a refined abundance matching relation between stellar mass and halo mass that reproduces the observed satellite stellar mass functions of the MW and M31 down to the regime where incompleteness is an issue, M_* ∼ 5 × 10^5 M_⊙. Within a larger region spanning approximately 3 Mpc, the same relation predicts that there should be ∼1000 galaxies with M_* > 10^3 M_⊙ awaiting discovery. We show that up to 50 per cent of haloes within 1 Mpc of the MW or M31 could be systems that have previously been within the virial radius of either giant. By associating never accreted haloes with gas-rich dwarfs, we show that there are plausibly 50 undiscovered dwarf galaxies with H i masses >10^5 M_⊙ within the local volume. The radial velocity distribution of these predicted gas-rich dwarfs can be used to inform follow-up searches based on ultracompact high-velocity clouds found in the ALFALFA survey.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Global and Planetary Change, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1f280a32a1940af19055eefd494dc450dd54e9a

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Citations in the corpus

Quenching and ram pressure stripping of simulated Milky Way satellite galaxies (2017, background): “…cosmological models with gas physics (Okamoto et al. 2010; Zolotov et al. 2012; Wetzel et al. 2016) or have focused on a large suite of dark matter only models that better probe cosmic variance, but do not include the effects of baryons (Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014; Hellwing et al. 2016).”
Evidence for two early accretion events that built the Milky Way stellar halo (2019, result): “The abundance matching relation of Garrison-Kimmel et al. (2014) gives similar estimates as well.”
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…”
Too big to fail in the Local Group (2014, methodology): “Each run in the ELVIS Suite was initialized with a large highresolution region to specifically enable study beyond the virial radius of the giant haloes without contamination due to low-resolution (high mass) particles.”
Ultradiffuse galaxies: the high-spin tail of the abundant dwarf galaxy population (2016, methodology): “We adopt the stellar-halo mass relationM∗(M200) proposed by Garrison-Kimmel et al. (2014), independently of redshift, with a scatter of 0.3 dex (Behroozi et al. 2013; Mashian et al. 2016).”
The upper bound on the lowest mass halo (2016, methodology): “In this regard, our approach is similar to that of Garrison-Kimmel et al. (2014), however here we do not limit our inference to satellites with stellar masses above 105M , but model the entirety of the Galactic satellite population.”
The APOSTLE project: Local Group kinematic mass constraints and simulation candidate selection (2015, methodology): “Other work (see e.g. Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014) has used velocities expressed in the LG-centric frame defined by Karachentsev & Makarov (1996).”
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).”
A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, background): “[521] dwarfs with the kinematics of the largest haloes present in a simulated LG analog (ELVIS simulation [523]).”
Bent by baryons: the low-mass galaxy-halo relation (2014, background): “It is also worth noting that our simulations with reionization only predict a few hundred dwarf galaxies within a radius of 2.5Mpc of the Local Group, in contradiction with recent results obtained from DMO simulations and abundance matching by Garrison-Kimmel et al. (2014).”
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.”
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).”
Milky Way Satellite Census. I. The Observational Selection Function for Milky Way Satellites in DES Y3 and Pan-STARRS DR1 (2019, result): “…al. 2009). lite population out to Rmax = 300 kpc, which is consistent with similar analyses in the literature (e.g., Hargis et al. 2014; Jethwa et al. 2018; Newton et al. 2018; Nadler et al. 2019b) and is roughly comparable to the virial radius of the Milky Way (e.g., Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014).”
Sweating the small stuff: simulating dwarf galaxies, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, and their own tiny satellites (2015, methodology): “In Section 4, we use the Exploring the Local Volume in Simulations (ELVIS) suite of dark-matteronly Local Group simulations (Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014) to determine how common these objects should be and the likelihood of their detection.”
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).”
Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, methodology): “…paradigm have demonstrated that dark matter (DM) clumps exist at all resolved masses, with no break in the subhalo mass function down to the numerical convergence limit (e.g., Springel et al. 2008; Kuhlen, Madau & Silk 2009; Stadel et al. 2009; Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014; Griffen et al. 2016).”