Too big to fail? The puzzling darkness of massive Milky Way subhaloes

By M. Boylan-Kolchin, James S. Bullock, M. Kaplinghat. 2011

1,120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT We show that dissipationless CDM simulations predict that the majority of themost massive subhalos of the Milky Way are too dense to host any of its brightsatellites (L V > 10 5 L ). These dark subhalos have circular velocities at infall ofV infall = 30 1070kms 1 and infall masses of [0:2 4] 10 M . Unless the Milky Way isa statistical anomaly, this implies that galaxy formation becomes e ectively stochasticat these masses. This is in marked contrast to the well-established monotonic relationbetween galaxy luminosity and halo circular velocity (or halo mass) for more massivehalos. We show that at least two (and typically four) of these massive dark subhalosare expected to produce a larger dark matter annihilation ux than Draco. It maybe possible to circumvent these conclusions if baryonic feedback in dwarf satellites ordi erent dark matter physics can reduce the central densities of massive subhalos byorder unity on a scale of 0.3 { 1 kpc.Key words: Galaxy: halo { galaxies: abundances { dark matter { cosmology: theory

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f5a6836b04a12db7b520f492ad2c05ac4dc33b35

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Citations in the corpus

Dark matter cores all the way down (2015, background): “Cusp-core transformations may also be key to solving two other small scale puzzles: the missing satellites problem (Moore et al. 1999; Klypin et al. 1999); and the ‘too-big-tofail’ problem (Read et al. 2006c; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011).”
Not so lumpy after all: modelling the depletion of dark matter subhaloes by Milky Way-like galaxies (2017, background): “This discrepancy, known as the ‘too-big-to-fail’ problem (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011, 2012; see also Tollerud et al. 2014 for similar results for M31 and Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014b; Papastergis et al. 2015 for field dwarf galaxies) may be resolved by internal baryonic processes, such as bursty…”
The Dawn of FIMP Dark Matter: A Review of Models and Constraints (2017, neutral): “core’ [162–167] and the ‘too-big-to-fail’ [168, 169] problems.”
Is there a "too big to fail" problem in the field? (2014, methodology): “In addition, the AM procedure in Ferrero et al. is performed on the basis of stellar mass, as is the case in all previous works assessing the TBTF problem (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011; Tollerud et al. 2014; Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2014).”
The APOSTLE simulations: solutions to the Local Group's cosmic puzzles (2015, background): “We next consider the ‘too-big-to-fail’ problem (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011; Parry et al. 2012).”
ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS: PROPERTIES OF THE STELLAR HALO AND THE MILKY WAY MASS DISTRIBUTION (2014, background): “One interpretation of the problem (Kauffmann et al. 1993; Klypin et al. 1999; Moore et al. 1999; Bullock 2010) is that theΛCDM paradigm predicts larger number of massive subhalos for the Milky Way size halo (e.g. Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011).”
`Skinny Milky Way please', says Sagittarius (2014, background): “Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2011) provide a lucid articulation of the problem.”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, methodology): “This formulation of the missing satellites problem was the direct progenitor of the “Too Big to Fail” (TBTF) problem [322, 323].”
Theory of dark matter superfluidity (2015, background): “Third, the superfluid scenario offers a simple, if not mundane, resolution to the cusp-core and “too big to fail” problems [15, 16].”
Core formation in dwarf haloes with self-interacting dark matter: no fine-tuning necessary (2014, methodology): “> 2× 105M ) Milky Way satellites used to define TBTF in Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2011, 2012).”
The current status of galaxy formation (2012, methodology): “However, this conclusion is disputed by Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2011), who use the Aquarius simulations (Springel et al., 2008) to predict more massive dwarfs in dark-matteronly simulations than are observed.”
Galactic Searches for Dark Matter (2012, background): “ft) and a WDM simulation (right). The data points are the masses within the halflight radius for the brightest dwarf spheroidals. Figure from Lovell et al. (2012); see larger sets of related gures in Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2011). at this stage to deduce more general conclusions about the population ”
Illuminating Low Surface Brightness Galaxies with the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey (2017, background): “…many of the most pressing problems currently facing the Λ Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) paradigm were discovered (and may be resolved) through studies of galaxies in the low-luminosity and/or LSB regime (e.g., Kauffmann et al. 1993; Klypin et al. 1999; Moore et al. 1999; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2011).”