English

What is the (Dark) Matter with Dwarf Galaxies?

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2015-05-18 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We present cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of the formation of dwarf galaxies in a representative sample of haloes extracted from the Millennium-II Simulation. Our six haloes have a z = 0 mass of ~10^10 solar masses and show different mass assembly histories which are reflected in different star formation histories. We find final stellar masses in the range 5 x 10^7 - 10^8 solar masses, consistent with other published simulations of galaxy formation in similar mass haloes. Our final objects have structures and stellar populations consistent with dwarf elliptical and dwarf irregular galaxies. However, in a Lambda CDM universe, 10^10 solar mass haloes must typically contain galaxies with much lower stellar mass than our simulated objects if they are to match observed galaxy abundances. The dwarf galaxies formed in our own and all other current hydrodynamical simulations are more than an order of magnitude more luminous than expected for haloes of this mass. We discuss the significance and possible implications of this result.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1003.0671,
  title  = {What is the (Dark) Matter with Dwarf Galaxies?},
  author = {Till Sawala and Qi Guo and Cecilia Scannapieco and Adrian Jenkins and Simon D. M. White},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1003.0671},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

12 pages, 4 figures, MNRAS accepted

R2 v1 2026-06-21T14:53:04.940Z