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Published July 11, 2018 | Published + Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

Environmental quenching of low-mass field galaxies

Abstract

In the local Universe, there is a strong division in the star-forming properties of low-mass galaxies, with star formation largely ubiquitous amongst the field population while satellite systems are predominantly quenched. This dichotomy implies that environmental processes play the dominant role in suppressing star formation within this low-mass regime (M_* ∼ 10^(5.5–8) M_⊙). As shown by observations of the Local Volume, however, there is a non-negligible population of passive systems in the field, which challenges our understanding of quenching at low masses. By applying the satellite quenching models of Fillingham et al. (2015) to subhalo populations in the Exploring the Local Volume In Simulations suite, we investigate the role of environmental processes in quenching star formation within the nearby field. Using model parameters that reproduce the satellite quenched fraction in the Local Group, we predict a quenched fraction – due solely to environmental effects – of ∼0.52 ± 0.26 within 1 < R/R_(vir) < 2 of the Milky Way and M31. This is in good agreement with current observations of the Local Volume and suggests that the majority of the passive field systems observed at these distances are quenched via environmental mechanisms. Beyond 2R_(vir), however, dwarf galaxy quenching becomes difficult to explain through an interaction with either the Milky Way or M31, such that more isolated, field dwarfs may be self-quenched as a result of star-formation feedback.

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/about_us/legal/notices) Accepted 2018 April 5. Received 2018 April 5; in original form 2018 January 5. We thank Tyler Kelley, Dan Weisz, Josh Simon, Andrew Wetzel, and Walden Cassotto for helpful discussions regarding this work. We also thank the anonymous referee for providing comments that helped clarify our work. This work was supported in part by NSF grants AST-1518257, AST-1517226, AST-1009973, and AST-1009999. Additional support was also provided by NASA through grants AR-12836, AR-13242, AR-13888, AR-13896, GO-14191, and AR-14289 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. MBK acknowledges support from NASA through grant NNX17AG29G. 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. CW was supported by the Lee A. DuBridge Postdoctoral Scholarship in Astrophysics. This research made extensive use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration 2013). Additionally, the Python packages NumPy (Walt et al. 2011), iPython (Pérez & Granger 2007), SciPy (Jones et al. 2001), and matplotlib (Hunter 2007) were utilized for our data analysis and presentation.

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Published - sty958.pdf

Accepted Version - 1802.03017

Accepted Version - nihms-997007.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023