Fossil remnants of reionization in the halo of the Milky Way

TL;DR

This study uses a detailed simulation of the Milky Way's dark matter halo to investigate the remnants of early star formation before reionization, revealing constraints on star formation efficiency and initial mass function in small halos.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis linking early progenitor halos to present-day dwarf galaxies, constraining star formation efficiency and initial mass function in small dark matter halos.

Findings

Progenitors above 1e6 Msun at redshift 11 could host metal-poor stars.

Star formation efficiency below 0.1% would overproduce faint dwarf spheroidals.

Early star formation likely lacked low-mass stars or was very inefficient.

Abstract

Our recently completed one billion particle Via Lactea II simulation of a Milky Way-sized dark matter halo resolves over 50,000 gravitationally bound clumps orbiting today within the virialized region of the main host. About 2,300 of these subhalos have one or more "progenitors" above 1e6 Msun at redshift 11, i.e. massive enough for their gas to have cooled via excitation of H2 and fragmented prior to the epoch of cosmic reionization. We count 4,500 such progenitors: if these were able to convert a fraction of their gas content into very metal-poor stars with a Salpeter initial mass function (IMF), they would be shining today with a visual magnitude M_V=6.7 per solar mass in stars. Assuming a universal baryon fraction, we show that mean star formation efficiencies as low as 0.1% in progenitors below 1e8 Msun would overproduce the abundance of the faint Galatic dwarf spheroidals observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Star formation at first light must have occurred either with an IMF lacking stars below 0.9 Msun, or was intrinsically very inefficient in small dark matter halos. If the latter, our results may be viewed as another hint of a minimum scale in galaxy formation.