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  • Letter
  • Published:

Demise of faint satellites around isolated early-type galaxies

A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 12 January 2018

This article has been updated

Abstract

The hierarchical galaxy formation scenario in the Cold Dark Matter cosmology with a non-vanishing cosmological constant Λ and geometrically flat space (ΛCDM) has been very successful in explaining the large-scale distribution of galaxies. However, there have been claims that ΛCDM over-predicts the number of satellite galaxies associated with massive galaxies compared with observations—the missing satellite galaxy problem1,2,3. Isolated groups of galaxies hosted by passively evolving massive early-type galaxies are ideal laboratories for identifying the missing physics in the current theory4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. Here, we report—based on a deep spectroscopic survey—that isolated massive and passive early-type galaxies without any signs of recent wet mergers or accretion episodes have almost no satellite galaxies fainter than the r-band absolute magnitude of about Mr = −14. If only early-type satellites are used, the cutoff is at the somewhat brighter magnitude of about Mr = −15. Such a cutoff has not been found in other nearby satellite galaxy systems hosted by late-type galaxies or those with merger features. Various physical properties of satellites depend strongly on the host-centric distance. Our observations indicate that the satellite galaxy luminosity function is largely determined by the interaction of satellites with the environment provided by their host.

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Fig. 1: Physical properties of satellite galaxies as a function of absolute magnitude.
Fig. 2: Luminosity function of the field galaxies in the GAMA G15 survey and the SHELS F1 and F2 surveys.
Fig. 3: Physical parameters of galaxies in the seven satellite galaxy systems of Table 1 as a function of host–satellite distance in units of host virial radius.

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Change history

  • 12 January 2018

    Owing to a technical error, in the version of this Letter originally published the data points and their outlines in Fig. 1c were shifted relative to their correct positions. This has now been corrected.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Korea Institute for Advanced Study for providing the computing resources (KIAS Center for Advanced Computation Linux Cluster System) for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

C.P. led the project and wrote most of the paper. H.S.H. conducted the spectroscopic survey and data analyses. H.P. analysed the simulation data for comparison with the observation. J.C.L. measured the stellar mass and Sérsic index of the satellite galaxies.

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Correspondence to Ho Seong Hwang.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0381-8.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Text, Supplementary Figures 1–4, Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary References

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Park, C., Hwang, H.S., Park, H. et al. Demise of faint satellites around isolated early-type galaxies. Nat Astron 2, 162–166 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-017-0332-9

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