EDGE - Dark matter or astrophysics?: Breaking dark matter heating degeneracies with H I rotation in faint dwarf galaxies

Martin P. Rey; Matthew D. A. Orkney; Justin I. Read; Payel Das; Oscar Agertz; Andrew Pontzen; Anastasia A. Ponomareva; Stacy Y. Kim; William McClymont

doi:10.1093/mnras/stae718

EDGE - Dark matter or astrophysics? Breaking dark matter heating degeneracies with H I rotation in faint dwarf galaxies

Martin P. Rey, Matthew D. A. Orkney, Justin I. Read, Payel Das, Oscar Agertz, Andrew Pontzen, Anastasia A. Ponomareva, Stacy Y. Kim, William McClymont

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

1 Citation (SciVal)

Abstract

Low-mass dwarf galaxies are expected to reside within dark matter haloes that have a pristine, 'cuspy' density profile within their stellar half-light radii. This is because they form too few stars to significantly drive dark matter heating through supernova-driven outflows. Here, we study such simulated faint systems ($10^4 \le M_{\star }\le 2 \times 10^6 \, \mbox{M}_\mathrm{\odot }$) drawn from high-resolution (3 pc) cosmological simulations from the 'Engineering Dwarf Galaxies at the Edge of galaxy formation' (EDGE) project. We confirm that these objects have steep and rising inner dark matter density profiles at z = 0, little affected by galaxy formation effects. But five dwarf galaxies from the suite also showcase a detectable H I reservoir ($M_{\mathrm{H\, {\small I} }}\approx 10^{5}-10^{6} \, \mbox{M}_\mathrm{\odot }$), analogous to the observed population of faint, H I-bearing dwarf galaxies. These reservoirs exhibit episodes of ordered rotation, opening windows for rotation curve analysis. Within actively star-forming dwarfs, stellar feedback easily disrupts the tenuous H I discs ($v_{\phi , g}\approx 10\, \mathrm{km} \, \mathrm{s}^{-1}$), making rotation short-lived ($\ll 150 \, \mathrm{Myr}$) and more challenging to interpret for dark matter inferences. In contrast, we highlight a long-lived ($\ge 500 \, \mathrm{Myr}$) and easy-to-interpret H I rotation curve extending to $\approx 2\, r_{1/2, \text{3D}}$ in a quiescent dwarf, that has not formed new stars since z = 4. This stable gas disc is supported by an oblate dark matter halo shape that drives high-angular momentum gas flows. Our results strongly motivate further searches for H I in rotation curves in the observed population of H I-bearing low-mass dwarfs, that provide a key regime to disentangle the respective roles of dark matter microphysics and galaxy formation effects in driving dark matter heating....

Original language	English
Journal	Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Early online date	11 Mar 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae718
Publication status	Published - 30 Apr 2024

Data Availability Statement

The data underlying this article will be shared on reasonable request to the corresponding author.

Funding

MR would like to thank Betsey Adams, Erwin de Blok, Corentin Cadiou, and Filippo Fraternali for insightful discussions during the construction of this work and comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We would like to thank the anonymous referee for a constructive review that improved the quality of the manuscript. MR is supported by the Beecroft Fellowship funded by Adrian Beecroft. MO acknowledges the UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for support (grant number ST/R505134/1). OA acknowledges support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Research Council (grant number 2019–04659), the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund and the Swedish National Space Agency (SNSA Dnr2023-00164). AP is supported by the Royal Society. AAP acknowledges support of the STFC consolidated grant numbers [ST/S000488/1] and [ST/W000903/1]. WM thanks the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Data intensive Science at the University of Cambridge (STFC grant number 2742968) for a PhD studentship. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 818085 GMGalaxies. This work was performed using the DiRAC Data Intensive service at Leicester, operated by the University of Leicester IT Services, which forms part of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility (www.dirac.ac.uk). The equipment was funded by BEIS capital funding via STFC capital grants ST/K000373/1 and ST/R002363/1 and STFC DiRAC Operations grant ST/R001014/1. DiRAC is part of the National e-Infrastructure. The authors acknowledge the use of the UCL Grace High Performance Computing Facility, the Surrey Eureka supercomputer facility, and their associated support services. This work was partially supported by the UCL Cosmoparticle Initiative. We thank the developers and maintainers of pynbody (Pontzen et al. 2013), tangos (Pontzen & Tremmel 2018), numpy (van der Walt, Colbert & Varoquaux 2011), scipy (Virtanen et al. 2020), jupyter (Ragan-Kelley et al. 2014), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), the Astrophysics Data Service and the arXiv preprint repository for providing open-source softwares and services that were used extensively in this work.

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10.1093/mnras/stae718Licence: CC BY

Engineering Dwarf Galaxy at the Edge of galaxy formation
Rey, M. (CoPI), Read, J. I. (PI), Agertz, O. (CoPI) & Pontzen, A. (CoPI)
1/04/19 → 1/04/27
Project: Research-related funding

Cite this

@article{09b478bfaae248289011045582fdad93,

title = "EDGE - Dark matter or astrophysics?: Breaking dark matter heating degeneracies with H I rotation in faint dwarf galaxies",

abstract = "Low-mass dwarf galaxies are expected to reside within dark matter haloes that have a pristine, 'cuspy' density profile within their stellar half-light radii. This is because they form too few stars to significantly drive dark matter heating through supernova-driven outflows. Here, we study such simulated faint systems ($10^4 \le M_{\star }\le 2 \times 10^6 \, \mbox{M}_\mathrm{\odot }$) drawn from high-resolution (3 pc) cosmological simulations from the 'Engineering Dwarf Galaxies at the Edge of galaxy formation' (EDGE) project. We confirm that these objects have steep and rising inner dark matter density profiles at z = 0, little affected by galaxy formation effects. But five dwarf galaxies from the suite also showcase a detectable H I reservoir ($M_{\mathrm{H\, {\small I} }}\approx 10^{5}-10^{6} \, \mbox{M}_\mathrm{\odot }$), analogous to the observed population of faint, H I-bearing dwarf galaxies. These reservoirs exhibit episodes of ordered rotation, opening windows for rotation curve analysis. Within actively star-forming dwarfs, stellar feedback easily disrupts the tenuous H I discs ($v_{\phi , g}\approx 10\, \mathrm{km} \, \mathrm{s}^{-1}$), making rotation short-lived ($\ll 150 \, \mathrm{Myr}$) and more challenging to interpret for dark matter inferences. In contrast, we highlight a long-lived ($\ge 500 \, \mathrm{Myr}$) and easy-to-interpret H I rotation curve extending to $\approx 2\, r_{1/2, \text{3D}}$ in a quiescent dwarf, that has not formed new stars since z = 4. This stable gas disc is supported by an oblate dark matter halo shape that drives high-angular momentum gas flows. Our results strongly motivate further searches for H I in rotation curves in the observed population of H I-bearing low-mass dwarfs, that provide a key regime to disentangle the respective roles of dark matter microphysics and galaxy formation effects in driving dark matter heating....",

author = "Rey, {Martin P.} and Orkney, {Matthew D. A.} and Read, {Justin I.} and Payel Das and Oscar Agertz and Andrew Pontzen and Ponomareva, {Anastasia A.} and Kim, {Stacy Y.} and William McClymont",

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T2 - Breaking dark matter heating degeneracies with H I rotation in faint dwarf galaxies

AU - Rey, Martin P.

AU - Orkney, Matthew D. A.

AU - Read, Justin I.

AU - Das, Payel

AU - Agertz, Oscar

AU - Pontzen, Andrew

AU - Ponomareva, Anastasia A.

AU - Kim, Stacy Y.

AU - McClymont, William

PY - 2024/4/30

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N2 - Low-mass dwarf galaxies are expected to reside within dark matter haloes that have a pristine, 'cuspy' density profile within their stellar half-light radii. This is because they form too few stars to significantly drive dark matter heating through supernova-driven outflows. Here, we study such simulated faint systems ($10^4 \le M_{\star }\le 2 \times 10^6 \, \mbox{M}_\mathrm{\odot }$) drawn from high-resolution (3 pc) cosmological simulations from the 'Engineering Dwarf Galaxies at the Edge of galaxy formation' (EDGE) project. We confirm that these objects have steep and rising inner dark matter density profiles at z = 0, little affected by galaxy formation effects. But five dwarf galaxies from the suite also showcase a detectable H I reservoir ($M_{\mathrm{H\, {\small I} }}\approx 10^{5}-10^{6} \, \mbox{M}_\mathrm{\odot }$), analogous to the observed population of faint, H I-bearing dwarf galaxies. These reservoirs exhibit episodes of ordered rotation, opening windows for rotation curve analysis. Within actively star-forming dwarfs, stellar feedback easily disrupts the tenuous H I discs ($v_{\phi , g}\approx 10\, \mathrm{km} \, \mathrm{s}^{-1}$), making rotation short-lived ($\ll 150 \, \mathrm{Myr}$) and more challenging to interpret for dark matter inferences. In contrast, we highlight a long-lived ($\ge 500 \, \mathrm{Myr}$) and easy-to-interpret H I rotation curve extending to $\approx 2\, r_{1/2, \text{3D}}$ in a quiescent dwarf, that has not formed new stars since z = 4. This stable gas disc is supported by an oblate dark matter halo shape that drives high-angular momentum gas flows. Our results strongly motivate further searches for H I in rotation curves in the observed population of H I-bearing low-mass dwarfs, that provide a key regime to disentangle the respective roles of dark matter microphysics and galaxy formation effects in driving dark matter heating....

AB - Low-mass dwarf galaxies are expected to reside within dark matter haloes that have a pristine, 'cuspy' density profile within their stellar half-light radii. This is because they form too few stars to significantly drive dark matter heating through supernova-driven outflows. Here, we study such simulated faint systems ($10^4 \le M_{\star }\le 2 \times 10^6 \, \mbox{M}_\mathrm{\odot }$) drawn from high-resolution (3 pc) cosmological simulations from the 'Engineering Dwarf Galaxies at the Edge of galaxy formation' (EDGE) project. We confirm that these objects have steep and rising inner dark matter density profiles at z = 0, little affected by galaxy formation effects. But five dwarf galaxies from the suite also showcase a detectable H I reservoir ($M_{\mathrm{H\, {\small I} }}\approx 10^{5}-10^{6} \, \mbox{M}_\mathrm{\odot }$), analogous to the observed population of faint, H I-bearing dwarf galaxies. These reservoirs exhibit episodes of ordered rotation, opening windows for rotation curve analysis. Within actively star-forming dwarfs, stellar feedback easily disrupts the tenuous H I discs ($v_{\phi , g}\approx 10\, \mathrm{km} \, \mathrm{s}^{-1}$), making rotation short-lived ($\ll 150 \, \mathrm{Myr}$) and more challenging to interpret for dark matter inferences. In contrast, we highlight a long-lived ($\ge 500 \, \mathrm{Myr}$) and easy-to-interpret H I rotation curve extending to $\approx 2\, r_{1/2, \text{3D}}$ in a quiescent dwarf, that has not formed new stars since z = 4. This stable gas disc is supported by an oblate dark matter halo shape that drives high-angular momentum gas flows. Our results strongly motivate further searches for H I in rotation curves in the observed population of H I-bearing low-mass dwarfs, that provide a key regime to disentangle the respective roles of dark matter microphysics and galaxy formation effects in driving dark matter heating....

U2 - 10.1093/mnras/stae718

DO - 10.1093/mnras/stae718

M3 - Article

SN - 0035-8711

JO - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

JF - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

ER -

EDGE - Dark matter or astrophysics? Breaking dark matter heating degeneracies with H I rotation in faint dwarf galaxies

Abstract

Data Availability Statement

Funding

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Engineering Dwarf Galaxy at the Edge of galaxy formation

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