The little things matter: relating the abundance of ultrafaint satellites to the hosts' assembly history

TL;DR

This study combines high-resolution simulations and semi-analytic models to explore how the abundance and distribution of ultrafaint dwarf satellites relate to the assembly history of Milky Way-like galaxies, revealing correlations with early formation and accretion events.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach linking ultrafaint satellite abundance to host halo assembly history, including detailed modeling of orphan galaxies and accretion events.

Findings

Earlier-assembled haloes host more ultrafaint satellites.

Ancient accretion events correlate with higher satellite counts.

Model matches observed satellite radial distribution in the Milky Way.

Abstract

Ultrafaint dwarf galaxies ($M_\star\lesssim10^{5-6}\,{\rm M}_\odot$) are relics of an early phase of galaxy formation. They contain some of the oldest and most metal-poor stars in the Universe which likely formed before the epoch of hydrogen reionisation. These galaxies are so faint that they can only be detected as satellites of the Milky Way. They are so small that they are just barely resolved in current cosmological hydrodynamics simulations. Here we combine very high resolution cosmological $N$-body simulations with a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation to study the demographics and spatial distribution of ultrafaint satellites in Milky Way-mass haloes. We show that the abundance of these galaxies is correlated with the assembly history of the host halo: at fixed mass, haloes assembled earlier contain, on average, more ultrafaint satellites today than haloes assembled later. We identify simulated galactic haloes that experience an ancient Gaia-Enceladus-Sausage-like and a recent LMC-like accretion event and find that the former occurs in 33% of the sample and the latter in 9%. Only 3% experience both events and these are especially rich in ultrafaint satellites, most acquired during the ancient accretion event. Our models predict that the radial distribution of satellites is more centrally concentrated in early-forming haloes. Accounting for the depletion of satellites by tidal interactions with the central disc, we find a very good match to the observed radial distribution of satellites in the Milky Way over the entire radial range. This agreement is mainly due to the ability of our model to track 'orphan' galaxies after their subhaloes fall below the resolution limit of the simulation.