Quenching and ram pressure stripping of simulated Milky Way satellite galaxies

By Christine Simpson, R. Grand, F. G'omez, F. Marinacci, Rüdiger Pakmor, Volker Springel, D. Campbell, Carlos S. Frenk. 2017

137 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present predictions for the quenching of star formation in satellite galaxies of the Local Group from a suite of 30 cosmological zoom simulations of Milky Way-like host galaxies. The Auriga simulations resolve satellites down to the luminosity of the classical dwarf spheroidal galaxies of the Milky Way. We find strong mass-dependent and distance-dependent quenching signals, where dwarf systems beyond 600 kpc are only strongly quenched below a stellar mass of 107 M⊙. Ram pressure stripping appears to be the dominant quenching mechanism and 50% of quenched systems cease star formation within 1 Gyr of first infall. We demonstrate that systems within a host galaxy’s R200 radius are comprised of two populations: (i) a first infall population that has entered the host halo within the past few Gyrs and (ii) a population of returning ‘backsplash’ systems that have had a much more extended interaction with the host. Backsplash galaxies that do not return to the host galaxy by redshift zero exhibit quenching properties similar to galaxies within R200 and are distinct from other external systems. The simulated quenching trend with stellar mass has some tension with observations, but our simulations are able reproduce the range of quenching times measured from resolved stellar populations of Local Group dwarf galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c38bab4225a2f418524c63c2a2ddd3884e3261a9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

Milky Way Satellite Census. II. Galaxy–Halo Connection Constraints Including the Impact of the Large Magellanic Cloud (2019, methodology): “This finding, along with constraints on the faint-end slope of the luminosity function, can be used to inform feedback prescriptions in hydrodynamic simulations (Sawala et al. 2016b; Simpson et al. 2018; Fitts et al. 2018; Wheeler et al. 2019; Munshi et al. 2019).”
Gaia DR2 proper motions of dwarf galaxies within 420 kpc (2018, background): “Such satellites can be considered alongside the backsplash population of satellites that exist beyond the virial radius at z=0 in simulations, but have been within the virial radius at earlier times (Balogh et al. 2000; Gill et al. 2005; Teyssier et al. 2012; Simpson et al. 2018).”
The Local Group on FIRE: dwarf galaxy populations across a suite of hydrodynamic simulations (2018, background): “…(Grand et al. 2017), high-resolution magnetohydrodynamic zoom-ins focusing on isolated MW-mass galaxies, also reproduce the MW/M31 satellite luminosity functions down to 5 × 105 M (Simpson et al. 2018), though to date there have been no analyses of the internal structure of those satellites.”
The milky way total mass profile as inferred from Gaia DR2 (2019, background): “…central and satellite galaxies, such as the stellar masses and star formation rates of spirals (Grand et al. 2017; Marinacci et al. 2017), the density and kinematics of stellar haloes (Deason et al. 2017; Monachesi et al. 2019b), and the luminosity function of MW satellites (Simpson et al. 2018).”