Luminosity function and radial distribution of Milky Way Satellites in a LCDM Universe

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that standard semi-analytic models within the Lambda Cold Dark Matter framework can accurately reproduce the observed luminosity function and radial distribution of Milky Way satellite galaxies, resolving previous discrepancies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison of semi-analytic galaxy formation models with observational data, showing these models can match satellite luminosity and distribution without requiring new physics.

Findings

Models reproduce observed satellite luminosity function over six orders of magnitude.

Good agreement between simulated and observed satellite distributions.

Physical processes like tidal destruction and supernova feedback are key to shaping satellite properties.

Abstract

We study the luminosity function and the radial distribution of satellite galaxies within Milky Way sized haloes as predicted in Cold Dark Matter based models of galaxy formation, making use of numerical N-body techniques as well as three different semi-analytic model (SAMs) galaxy formation codes. We extract merger trees from very high-resolution dissipationless simulations of four Galaxy-sized DM haloes, and use these as common input for the semi-analytic models. We present a detailed comparison of our predictions with the observational data recently obtained on the Milky Way satellite luminosity function (LF). We find that semi-analytic models with rather standard astrophysical ingredients are able to reproduce the observed luminosity function over six orders of magnitude in luminosity, down to magnitudes as faint as M_V=-2. We also perform a comparison with the actual observed number of satellites as a function of luminosity, by applying the selection criteria of the SDSS survey to our simulations instead of correcting the observations for incompleteness. Using this approach we again find good agreement for both the luminosity and radial distributions of MW satellites. We investigate which physical processes in our models are responsible for shaping the predicted satellite LF, and find that tidal destruction, suppression of gas infall by a photo-ionizing background, and supernova feedback all make important contributions. We conclude that the number and luminosity of Milky Way satellites can be naturally accounted for within the (Lambda) Cold Dark Matter paradigm, and this should no longer be considered a problem.