Star Formation History of Dwarf Galaxies in Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations

TL;DR

This paper reviews the challenges and progress in simulating the star formation histories of dwarf galaxies using cosmological hydrodynamic simulations, highlighting current limitations and future directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in simulating dwarf galaxy star formation histories and discusses the impact of numerical methods and resolution effects.

Findings

Differences in simulation results are partly due to numerical and resolution effects.

Simulating episodic star formation in dwarf galaxies remains challenging.

Large-scale simulations are needed for better understanding of dwarf galaxy evolution.

Abstract

We examine the past and current work on the star formation (SF) histories of dwarf galaxies in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. The results obtained from different numerical methods are still somewhat mixed, but the differences are understandable if we consider the numerical and resolution effects. It remains a challenge to simulate the episodic nature of SF history in dwarf galaxies at late times within the cosmological context of a cold dark matter model. More work is needed to solve the mysteries of SF history of dwarf galaxies employing large-scale hydrodynamic simulations on the next generation of supercomputers.