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Title: The Importance of Preventive Feedback: Inference from Observations of the Stellar Masses and Metallicities of Milky Way Dwarf Galaxies

Journal Article · · The Astrophysical Journal (Online)
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2]; ORCiD logo [3]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [4]; ORCiD logo [5]; ORCiD logo [6]
  1. The Carnegie Institution for Science, Pasadena, CA (United States)
  2. The Carnegie Institution for Science, Pasadena, CA (United States); California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA (United States); Univ. of California, Davis, CA (United States)
  3. Univ. of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA (United States)
  4. The Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH (United States)
  5. Univ. of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX (United States)
  6. Stanford Univ., Stanford, CA (United States); SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States)

Dwarf galaxies are known to have remarkably low star formation efficiency due to strong feedback. Adopting the dwarf galaxies of the Milky Way (MW) as a laboratory, we explore a flexible semi-analytic galaxy formation model to understand how the feedback processes shape the satellite galaxies of the MW. Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo, we exhaustively search a large parameter space of the model and rigorously show that the general wisdom of strong outflows as the primary feedback mechanism cannot simultaneously explain the stellar mass function and the mass–metallicity relation of the MW satellites. An extended model that assumes that a fraction of baryons is prevented from collapsing into low-mass halos in the first place can be accurately constrained to simultaneously reproduce those observations. Here, the inference suggests that two different physical mechanisms are needed to explain the two different data sets. In particular, moderate outflows with weak halo mass dependence are needed to explain the mass–metallicity relation, and prevention of baryons falling into shallow gravitational potentials of low-mass halos (e.g., "pre-heating") is needed to explain the low stellar mass fraction for a given subhalo mass.

Research Organization:
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC), Menlo Park, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-76SF00515
OSTI ID:
1394067
Journal Information:
The Astrophysical Journal (Online), Vol. 846, Issue 1; ISSN 1538-4357
Publisher:
Institute of Physics (IOP)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Low Metallicities and Old Ages for Three Ultra-diffuse Galaxies in the Coma Cluster journal May 2018
Modeling the Impact of Baryons on Subhalo Populations with Machine Learning journal June 2018
The Origin of r -process Enhanced Metal-poor Halo Stars In Now-destroyed Ultra-faint Dwarf Galaxies journal February 2019
Is the Stellar Mass–Stellar Metallicity Relation Universal in the Milky Way Satellites and Beyond? journal March 2019
Accurate Modeling of the Projected Galaxy Clustering in Photometric Surveys. I. Tests with Mock Catalogs journal July 2019
The Origin of the Stellar Mass–Stellar Metallicity Relation in the Milky Way Satellites and Beyond journal July 2019
Galactic Winds in Low-mass Galaxies journal November 2019
Galactic Winds in Low-Mass Galaxies journal August 2018
Modeling the Impact of Baryons on Subhalo Populations with Machine Learning text January 2017
Evolution of the Stellar Mass--Metallicity Relation - I: Galaxies in the z~0.4 Cluster Cl0024 text January 2018
Is the stellar mass-stellar metallicity relation universal in the Milky Way satellites and beyond? text January 2019
The Origin of the Stellar Mass-Stellar Metallicity Relation in the Milky Way Satellites and beyond text January 2019
Accurate Modeling of the Projected Galaxy Clustering in Photometric Surveys: I. Tests with Mock Catalogs text January 2019