Environmental effect on the subhalo abundance -- a solution to the missing dwarf problem

TL;DR

This study shows that the environmental density influences subhalo abundance, suggesting the missing dwarf problem arises from biased initial conditions rather than a fundamental issue with dark matter models.

Contribution

It demonstrates that local density variations significantly affect subhalo counts, providing a potential solution to the missing dwarf problem by considering environmental effects.

Findings

Subhalo abundance varies greatly with local density.

Galaxies in low-density regions have fewer subhalos.

The missing dwarf problem may be due to biased initial conditions.

Abstract

Recent high-resolution simulations of the formation of dark-matter halos have shown that the distribution of subhalos is scale-free, in the sense that if scaled by the velocity dispersion of the parent halo, the velocity distribution function of galaxy-sized and cluster-sized halos are identical. For cluster-sized halos, simulation results agreed well with observations. Simulations, however, predicted far too many subhalos for galaxy-sized halos. Our galaxy has several tens of known dwarf galaxies. On the other hands, simulated dark-matter halos contain thousands of subhalos. We have performed simulation of a single large volume and measured the abundance of subhalos in all massive halos. We found that the variation of the subhalo abundance is very large, and those with largest number of subhalos correspond to simulated halos in previous studies. The subhalo abundance depends strongly on the local density of the background. Halos in high-density regions contain large number of subhalos. Our galaxy is in the low-density region. For our simulated halos in low-density regions, the number of subhalos is within a factor of three to that of our galaxy. We argue that the ``missing dwarf problem'' is not a real problem but caused by the biased selection of the initial conditions in previous studies, which were not appropriate for field galaxies.