EDGE: The direct link between mass growth history and the extended stellar haloes of the faintest dwarf galaxies

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations to show that ultra-faint dwarf galaxies' shapes and extended stellar halos can result from late-time accretion rather than tidal forces, linking their morphology to formation history.

Contribution

It demonstrates a causal relationship between ellipticity and formation time in isolated ultra-faint dwarfs, challenging the tidal disruption paradigm and matching observations.

Findings

Simulated dwarfs exhibit a wide range of ellipticities.

Ellipticity correlates strongly with formation time.

Observed dwarf ellipticities align with simulation predictions.

Abstract

Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies (UFDs) are commonly found in close proximity to the Milky Way and other massive spiral galaxies. As such, their projected stellar ellipticity and extended light distributions are often thought to owe to tidal forces. In this paper, we study the projected stellar ellipticities and faint stellar outskirts of tidally isolated ultra-faints drawn from the 'Engineering Dwarfs at Galaxy Formation's Edge' (EDGE) cosmological simulation suite. Despite their tidal isolation, our simulated dwarfs exhibit a wide range of projected ellipticities ($0.03 < \varepsilon < 0.85$), with many possessing anisotropic extended stellar haloes that mimic tidal tails, but owe instead to late-time accretion of lower mass companions. Furthermore, we find a strong causal relationship between ellipticity and formation time of an UFD, which is robust to a wide variation in the feedback model. We show that the distribution of projected ellipticities in our suite of simulated EDGE dwarfs matches well with that of 21 Local Group dwarf galaxies. Given the ellipticity in EDGE arises from an ex-situ accretion origin, the agreement in shape indicates the ellipticities of some observed dwarfs may also originate from a similar non-tidal scenario. The orbital parameters of these observed dwarfs further support that they are not currently tidally disrupting. If the baryonic content in these galaxies is still tidally intact, then the same may be true for their dark matter content, making these galaxies in our Local Group pristine laboratories for testing dark matter and galaxy formation models.