The Hubble Space Telescope Survey of M31 Satellite Galaxies IV. Survey Overview and Lifetime Star Formation Histories

TL;DR

This study uses HST imaging to analyze star formation histories of 36 M31 satellite galaxies, revealing correlations with luminosity and distance, and comparing observations with simulations to understand galaxy evolution.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, homogeneous set of star formation histories for M31 satellites, highlighting key environmental and intrinsic factors influencing their evolution.

Findings

Median stellar age correlates with luminosity and distance from M31.

No difference in SFH between satellites on and off the great plane.

Approximately 50% show ancient star formation with delayed quenching.

Abstract

From $>1000$ orbits of HST imaging, we present deep homogeneous resolved star color-magnitude diagrams that reach the oldest main sequence turnoff and uniformly measured star formation histories (SFHs) of 36 dwarf galaxies ($-6 \ge M_V \ge -17$) associated with the M31 halo, and for 10 additional fields in M31, M33, and the Giant Stellar Stream. From our SFHs we find: i) the median stellar age and quenching epoch of M31 satellites correlate with galaxy luminosity and galactocentric distance. Satellite luminosity and present-day distance from M31 predict the satellite quenching epoch to within $1.8$ Gyr at all epochs. This tight relationship highlights the fundamental connection between satellite halo mass, environmental history, and star formation duration. ii) There is no difference between the median SFH of galaxies on and off the great plane of Andromeda satellites. iii) $\sim50$\% of our M31 satellites show prominent ancient star formation ($>12$ Gyr ago) followed by delayed quenching ($8-10$ Gyr ago), which is not commonly observed among the MW satellites. iv) A comparison with TNG50 and FIRE-2 simulated satellite dwarfs around M31-like hosts show that some of these trends (dependence of SFH on satellite luminosity) are reproduced in the simulations while others (dependence of SFH on galactocentric distance, presence of the delayed-quenching population) are weaker or absent. We provide all photometric catalogs and SFHs as High-Level Science Products on MAST.