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Published March 2019 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Warm FIRE: simulating galaxy formation with resonant sterile neutrino dark matter

Abstract

We study the impact of a warm dark matter (WDM) cosmology on dwarf galaxy formation through a suite of cosmological hydrodynamical zoom-in simulations of M_(halo) ≈ 10^(10) M⊙ dark matter haloes as part of the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) project. A main focus of this paper is to evaluate the combined effects of dark matter physics and stellar feedback on the well-known small-scale issues found in cold dark matter (CDM) models. We find that the z = 0 stellar mass of a galaxy is strongly correlated with the central density of its host dark matter halo at the time of formation, z_f, in both CDM and WDM models. WDM haloes follow the same M⋆(⁠z = 0)–V_(max)(⁠z_f) relation as in CDM, but they form later, are less centrally dense, and therefore contain galaxies that are less massive than their CDM counterparts. As a result, the impact of baryonic effects on the central gravitational potential is typically diminished relative to CDM. However, the combination of delayed formation in WDM and energy input from stellar feedback results in dark matter profiles with lower overall densities. The WDM galaxies studied here have a wider diversity of star formation histories (SFHs) than the same systems simulated in CDM, and the two lowest M⋆ WDM galaxies form all of their stars at late times. The discovery of young ultrafaint dwarf galaxies with no ancient star formation – which do not exist in our CDM simulations – would therefore provide evidence in support of WDM.

Additional Information

© 2018 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model). Accepted 2018 November 27. Received 2018 November 16; in original form 2018 March 13. Published: 12 December 2018. MBK and AF acknowledge support from NSF grant AST-1517226. MBK was also partially supported by NASA grants NNX17AG29G and HST-AR-13888, HST-AR-13896, HST-AR-14282, HST-AR-14554, HST-GO-12914, and HST-GO-14191 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. KNA is supported by NSF Theoretical Physics Grant No. PHY-1620638. DK was supported by NSF grant AST-1715101 and the Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. Support for SGK was provided by NASA through Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship grant number PF5-160136 awarded by the Chandra X-ray Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for NASA under contract NAS8-03060. CAFG was supported by NSF through grants AST-1412836, AST-1517491, AST-1715216, and CAREER award AST-1652522, by NASA through grant NNX15AB22G, and by a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

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Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023