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Register a new userDwarf Galaxies in 2010: Revealing Galaxy Formations Threshold and Testing the Nature of Dark Matter
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James S. Bullock
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Over the past five years, searches in Sloan Digital Sky Survey data have more than doubled the number of known dwarf satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, and have revealed a population of ultra-faint galaxies with luminosities smaller than typical globular clusters, L ~ 1000 Lsun. These systems are the faintest, most dark matter dominated, and most metal poor galaxies in the universe. Completeness corrections suggest that we are poised on the edge of a vast discovery space in galaxy phenomenology, with hundreds more of these extreme galaxies to be discovered as future instruments hunt for the low-luminosity threshold of galaxy formation. Dark matter dominated dwarfs of this kind probe the small-scale power-spectrum, provide the most stringent limits on the phase-space packing of dark matter, and offer a particularly useful target for dark matter indirect detection experiments. Full use of dwarfs as dark matter laboratories will require synergy between deep, large-area photometric searches; spectroscopic and astrometric follow-up with next-generation optical telescopes; and subsequent observations with gamma-ray telescopes for dark matter indirect detection.
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We present the first cosmological simulations of dwarf galaxies, which include dark matter self-interactions and baryons. We study two dwarf galaxies within cold dark matter, and four different elastic self-interacting scenarios with constant and velocity-dependent cross sections, motivated by a new force in the hidden dark matter sector. Our highest resolution simulation has a baryonic mass resolution of $1.8times 10^2,{rm M}_odot$ and a gravitational softening length of $34,{rm pc}$ at $z=0$. In this first study we focus on the regime of mostly isolated dwarf galaxies with halo masses $sim10^{10},{rm M}_odot$ where dark matter dynamically dominates even at sub-kpc scales. We find that while the global properties of galaxies of this scale are minimally affected by allowed self-interactions, their internal structures change significantly if the cross section is large enough within the inner sub-kpc region. In these dark-matter-dominated systems, self-scattering ties the shape of the stellar distribution to that of the dark matter distribution. In particular, we find that the stellar core radius is closely related to the dark matter core radius generated by self-interactions. Dark matter collisions lead to dwarf galaxies with larger stellar cores and smaller stellar central densities compared to the cold dark matter case. The central metallicity within $1,{rm kpc}$ is also larger by up to $sim 15%$ in the former case. We conclude that the mass distribution, and characteristics of the central stars in dwarf galaxies can potentially be used to probe the self-interacting nature of dark matter.
For nearly 40 years, dark matter has been widely assumed to be cold and collisionless. Cold dark matter models make fundamental predictions for the behavior of dark matter on small (<10 kpc) scales. These predictions include cuspy density profiles at the centers of dark matter halos and a halo mass function that increases as dN/dM ~ M^-1.9 down to very small masses. We suggest two observational programs relying on extremely large telescopes to critically test these predictions, and thus shed new light on the nature of dark matter. (1) Combining adaptive optics-enabled imaging with deep spectroscopy to measure the three-dimensional motions of stars within a sample of Local Group dwarf galaxies that are the cleanest dark matter laboratories known in the nearby universe. From these observations the inner slope of the dark matter density profile can be determined with an accuracy of 0.20 dex, enabling a central cusp to be distinguished from a core at 5 sigma significance. (2) Diffraction-limited AO imaging and integral field spectroscopy of gravitationally lensed galaxies and quasars to quantify the abundance of dark substructures in the halos of the lens galaxies and along the line of sight. Observations of 50 lensed arcs and 50 multiply-imaged quasars will be sufficient to measure the halo mass function over the range 10^7 < M < 10^10 Msun at cosmological scales, independent of the baryonic and stellar composition of those structures. These two observational probes provide complementary information about the small scale structure, with a joint self-consistent analysis mitigating limitations of either probe. This program will produce the strongest existing constraints on the properties of dark matter on small scales, allowing conclusive tests of alternative warm, fuzzy, and self-interacting dark matter models.
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.
We develop the framework for testing Lorentz invariance in the dark matter sector using galactic dynamics. We consider a Lorentz violating (LV) vector field acting on the dark matter component of a satellite galaxy orbiting in a host halo. We introduce a numerical model for the dynamics of satellites in a galactic halo and for a galaxy in a rich cluster to explore observational consequences of such an LV field. The orbital motion of a satellite excites a time dependent LV force which greatly affects its internal dynamics. Our analysis points out key observational signatures which serve as probes of LV forces. These include modifications to the line of sight velocity dispersion, mass profiles and shapes of satellites. With future data and a more detailed modeling these signatures can be exploited to constrain a new region of the parameter space describing the LV in the dark matter sector.
We show that cold dark matter particles interacting through a Yukawa potential could naturally explain the recently observed cores in dwarf galaxies without affecting the dynamics of objects with a much larger velocity dispersion, such as clusters of galaxies. The velocity dependence of the associated cross-section as well as the possible exothermic nature of the interaction alleviates earlier concerns about strongly interacting dark matter. Dark matter evaporation in low-mass objects might explain the observed deficit of satellite galaxies in the Milky Way halo and have important implications for the first galaxies and reionization.
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