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Early gas stripping as the origin of the darkest galaxies in the Universe

Nature volume 445, pages 738–740 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

The known galaxies most dominated by dark matter (Draco, Ursa Minor and Andromeda IX) are satellites of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies1,2,3,4. They are members of a class of faint galaxies, devoid of gas, known as dwarf spheroidals3,4,5, and have by far the highest ratio of dark to luminous matter3,6. None of the models proposed to unravel their origin7,8,9,10 can simultaneously explain their exceptional dark matter content and their proximity to a much larger galaxy. Here we report simulations showing that the progenitors of these galaxies were probably gas-dominated dwarf galaxies that became satellites of a larger galaxy earlier than the other dwarf spheroidals. We find that a combination of tidal shocks and ram pressure swept away the entire gas content of such progenitors about ten billion years ago because heating by the cosmic ultraviolet background kept the gas loosely bound: a tiny stellar component embedded in a relatively massive dark halo survived until today. All luminous galaxies should be surrounded by a few extremely dark-matter-dominated dwarf spheroidal satellites, and these should have the shortest orbital periods among dwarf spheroidals because they were accreted early.

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Figure 1: Morphological evolution of the dwarf galaxy satellite.
Figure 2: Structural properties of the simulated dwarf after 10 billion years of evolution.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Y. Birinboim, A. Dekel, F. Governato, A. Kravtsov, G. Lake, C. Porciani, M. Valluri, B. Willman and A. Zentner, for discussions. We also thank S. Majewski and R. Munoz for sharing their data with us. L. Mayer and S. Kazantzidis are grateful to the Aspen Center for Physics, where some of this work was completed. All computations were performed on the Zbox supercomputer at the University of Zürich, on LeMieux at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and on the Gonzales cluster at ETH Zürich.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Zurich, Winterthurestrasse 190, CH-8057 Zürich, Switzerland,

    L. Mayer

  2. Department of Physics, Institut für Astronomie, ETH Zürich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 16, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland,

    L. Mayer

  3. Department of Physics, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, MS 29, Stanford, California 94309, USA,

    S. Kazantzidis

  4. Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, The University of Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA,

    S. Kazantzidis

  5. Universitäts Sternwarte München, Scheinerstrasse 1, D-81679 München, Germany,

    C. Mastropietro

  6. Department of Physics and Astronomy, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4M1, Canada,

    J. Wadsley

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  1. L. Mayer
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Correspondence to L. Mayer or S. Kazantzidis.

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Mayer, L., Kazantzidis, S., Mastropietro, C. et al. Early gas stripping as the origin of the darkest galaxies in the Universe. Nature 445, 738–740 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05552

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