TL;DR
This paper reviews efforts to identify truly isolated galaxies, highlighting the challenges and suggesting that the nearby universe may host many small dark-matter haloes that could form dwarf galaxies by accreting intergalactic gas.
Contribution
It provides an updated account of the difficulty in finding genuinely isolated galaxies and discusses implications for dark matter and galaxy formation.
Findings
Difficulty in identifying truly isolated galaxies.
Presence of many small dark-matter haloes in the nearby universe.
Potential formation of dwarf galaxies through gas accretion.
Abstract
I describe attempts to identify and understand the most isolated galaxies starting from my 1983 Leiden PhD thesis, continuing through a string of graduate theses on various aspects of this topic, and concluding with an up-to-date account of the difficulty to find really isolated objects. The implication of some of the findings revealed on the way and presented here is that the nearby Universe may contain many small dark-matter haloes, and that some such haloes may possibly be accreting intergalactic gas to form dwarf galaxies.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAstronomy and Astrophysical Research · History and Developments in Astronomy