A low pre-infall mass for the Carina dwarf galaxy from disequilibrium modelling

Uğur Ural (), Mark I. Wilkinson, Justin I. Read and Matthew G. Walker
Additional contact information
Uğur Ural: Leibniz Institute für Astrophysik Potsdam
Mark I. Wilkinson: University of Leicester
Justin I. Read: Astrophysics Research Group, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey
Matthew G. Walker: McWilliams Center for Cosmology, Carnegie Mellon University

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-5

Abstract: Abstract Dark matter-only simulations of galaxy formation predict many more subhalos around a Milky Way-like galaxy than the number of observed satellites. Proposed solutions require the satellites to inhabit dark matter halos with masses 109–1010Msun at the time they fell into the Milky Way. Here we use a modelling approach, independent of cosmological simulations, to obtain a pre-infall mass of Msun for one of the Milky Way’s satellites: Carina. This determination of a low halo mass for Carina can be accommodated within the standard model only if galaxy formation becomes stochastic in halos below ∼1010Msun. Otherwise Carina, the eighth most luminous Milky Way dwarf, would be expected to inhabit a significantly more massive halo. The implication of this is that a population of ‘dark dwarfs’ should orbit the Milky Way: halos devoid of stars and yet more massive than many of their visible counterparts.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8599 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms8599

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8599

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().