Seminar by Dilys Ruan, Rutgers
Dwarf galaxies have stellar masses < 109 Msun, with shallow gravitational potential wells, and therefore they are ideal laboratories to study dark matter + gas physics in tandem. My research focuses on tracing the dark matter halo through the gas disk and predicting constraints for observations. I utilize the N-Body Shop's Marvel-ous and Marvelous Massive Dwarfs smoothed particle hydrodynamics + N-body simulation sets. Our sample has 66 dwarf galaxies with stellar masses from 106-109 Msun and matches observations in terms of HI mass and size. I will share my work on the baryonic Tully Fisher Relation (“bTFR”, typically a power-law relation between baryonic mass vs rotation velocity). Due to the inefficient star formation of dwarf galaxies, we find a turndown in the bTFR at baryonic masses < 108.5 Msol, corresponding to 50 km/s, which is consistent with the literature. After comparing different observationally-oriented HI velocity definitions, we determine that the only way to measure a turndown in the bTFR is with spatially resolved rotation curves at an HI surface density limit < 0.08 Msol/pc2, which is feasible with surveys like FEASTS and MHONGOOSE.
Host: Jingyao Zhu