Related papers: Why Are There Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies?
In cold dark matter cosmologies, small mass halos outnumber larger mass halos at any redshift. However, the lower bound for the mass of a galaxy is unknown, as are the typical luminosity of the smallest galaxies and their numbers in the…
Low-mass dwarf galaxies ($M_{\rm vir} \lesssim 10^9\rm\ M_\odot$) are fundamental cosmological building blocks, yet the physical processes driving their structural diversity remain poorly understood. Recent numerical simulations have…
There is accumulating evidence that the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function might be very different in different locations. The luminosity function might be rising in rich clusters and flat or declining in regions of low density. If…
We constrain the parameters of a self-interacting massive dark matter scalar particle in a condensate using the kinematics of the eight brightest dwarf spheroidal satellites of the Milky Way. For the case of a repulsive self-interaction the…
Hierarchical Cold Dark Matter (CDM) models predict that Milky Way (MW) sized halos contain hundreds of dense low-mass dark satellites, an order of magnitude more than the number of observed satellites in the Local Group (LG). If the CDM…
Dwarf galaxies provide a special environment due to their low mass, small size and generally low metal content. These attributes make them perfect laboratories for the interaction of massive stars with the interstellar medium on small and…
Dwarf galaxies are the least massive, most abundant, and most widely distributed type of galaxies. Hence, they are key to testing theories of galaxy and Universe evolution. Dwarf galaxies sufficiently close to have their gas and stellar…
The Milky Way's dwarf spheroidal satellites include the nearest, smallest and least luminous galaxies known. They also exhibit the largest discrepancies between dynamical and luminous masses. This article reviews the development of…
The status of kinematic observations in Local Group dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) is reviewed. Various approaches to the dynamical modelling of these data are discussed and some general features of dSph dark matter haloes based on…
Dark matter (DM) halos of Sc-Im and dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies satisfy scaling laws: halos in lower-luminosity galaxies have smaller core radii, higher central densities, and smaller velocity dispersions. These results are based on…
Dark matter as a Bose-Einstein condensate, such as the axionic scalar field particles of String Theory, can explain the coldness of dark matter on large scales. Pioneering simulations in this context predict a rich wave-like structure, with…
We review the most recent evidence for the amazing properties of the density distribution of dark matter around spiral galaxies. Their rotation curves, coadded according to the galaxy luminosity, conform to an universal profile which can be…
The large gap between a galactic dark matter subhalo's velocity and its own gravitational binding velocity creates the situation that small subhalos can be evaporated before dark matter thermalize with baryons due to the low binding…
The nature of dark matter is one of the outstanding questions of astrophysics. The internal motions of member stars reveal that the lowest luminosity galaxies in the Local Group are the most dark-matter dominated. New large datasets allow…
We summarize current models of the formation of spheroidal stellar systems. Whereas globular clusters form in an efficient mode of star formation inside turbulent molecular clouds, the origin of galactic spheroids, that is bulges, dwarf…
We explore observed dynamical trends in a wide range of dark matter dominated systems (about seven orders of magnitude in mass) to constrain hypothetical dark matter candidates and scenarios of structure formation. First, we argue that…
We present evidence for the existence of an old stellar halo in the dwarf irregular galaxy WLM, an isolated member of the Local Group. The halo consists of population-II stars, with low metallicities and age $\geq 10^{10}$yr. The finding of…
The dwarf spheroidal (dSph) satellites of the Local Group have long been thought to be simple spheroids of stars embedded within extended dark matter halos. Recently, however, evidence for the presence of spatially and kinematically…
Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are known to be dominated by old stellar populations. This has led to the assumption that their gas-rich progenitors lost their gas during their infall in the Milky Way (MW) halo at distant look-back times. Here,…
We present a list of 75 isolated late-type dwarf galaxies which have no neighbors with a relative radial velocity difference of less than 500 km/s or projected separations within 500 kpc. These were selected from $\sim$2000 dwarf galaxies…