The Impact of Local Stellar Radiation on Dwarf Galaxy Formation Around Milky Way Analogues Across Cosmic Reionization

TL;DR

This study uses simulations to show that local stellar radiation significantly suppresses dwarf galaxy formation around Milky Way analogues before reionization, but its impact diminishes after redshift 4, with minimal effect on present-day satellite populations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that local stellar radiation effectively suppresses early dwarf galaxy formation around MW analogues, revealing its diminishing influence over cosmic time.

Findings

Local stellar radiation suppresses dwarf galaxy formation before reionization.

Impact of local stellar radiation decreases and nearly vanishes after redshift 4.

Faint satellite galaxy reduction is about 13%, within statistical uncertainty.

Abstract

We explore the effect of local stellar radiation on the formation and evolution of dwarf galaxies around Milky Way (MW) analogues. Using five simulations from the Auriga project, both with and without local stellar radiation, we find that local stellar radiation, as a pre-reionization source, is highly effective at photoionizing and heating the gas around the proto-MW analogues. As a result, the formation of surrounding dwarf galaxies in dark matter halos with masses below approximately $10^{9.5}\,\mathrm{M_{\odot}}$ are significantly suppressed. After reionization, the intensity of local stellar radiation eventually becomes comparable to the ultraviolet background (UVB). Consequently, the impact of local stellar radiation on the surrounding dwarf galaxy formation decreases with decreasing redshift and nearly vanishes after redshift $z=4$. At present day, the bright satellite population in the simulations with and without local stellar radiation is nearly identical. While our simulations do not have sufficient resolution to resolve the faintest satellite galaxies which are most prone to the local stellar radiation, we use the accreted galaxy mass function to assess the impact and find that the reduction in the faintest satellite is around $13$ percent in the presence of local stellar radiation, but this difference is within $\sim2\sigma$ of the Poisson uncertainty and thus not statistically significant.