English

$V/\sigma$ Trends with Mass for Dwarf Galaxies from the Marvelous Massive Dwarfs Suite

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-05-11 v1

Abstract

Galaxy formation scenarios can be interpreted through galaxy morphology and the level of rotational versus pressure support, quantified through the ratio of a galaxy's rotation speed to its velocity dispersion: V/σV/\sigma. Observational studies of dwarf galaxies find that V/σV/\sigma does not strongly depend on environment, and may weakly depend on galaxy mass, which could shift our understanding of how dwarf galaxies form. We utilize the Marvelous Massive Dwarfs suite to examine whether V/σV/\sigma depends on mass in simulations, and understand how this varies for different baryonic components of the galaxy: HI gas, young stars (<< 1 Gyr) and old stars (>> 1 Gyr). We use a simulation sample of 67 isolated dwarf galaxies with M=106109_\star=10^6-10^9 M_\odot and produce line-of-sight maps for rotation speed and dispersion for different viewing angles of each galaxy. We find that V/σV/\sigma increases with mass, and that HI gas and young stars are more rotation-supported (V/σ113V/\sigma\approx 1-13) while old stars are more dispersion-supported (V/σ0.25V/\sigma\approx 0.2-5). This result is consistent with the scenario where young stars are born from dynamically cold gas in the interstellar medium and undergo dynamical heating over time. We quantify the effects of spatial resolution in observational determinations of V/σV/\sigma and find that existing observations using old stars may underestimate the intrinsic V/σV/\sigma. We find a correlation between V/σHI,globalV/\sigma_\mathrm{HI,global} and HI line profile shape that is qualitatively similar to previous simulation results, but we find higher V/σHI,globalV/\sigma_\mathrm{HI,global} compared to prior work which found values 2\lesssim 2 for most galaxies in this mass range. Our results motivate future work to examine V/σV/\sigma and dwarf galaxy formation with different kinematic tracers of the galaxy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.06893,
  title  = {$V/\sigma$ Trends with Mass for Dwarf Galaxies from the Marvelous Massive Dwarfs Suite},
  author = {Dilys Ruan and Alyson M. Brooks and Leonardo A. Barba and Mithi A. C. de los Reyes and Akaxia Cruz and Robel Geda and Annika H. G. Peter and Benjamin W. Keller and Thomas Quinn and James W. Wadsley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.06893},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

26 pages, 12 figures, submitted to ApJ