| Autor: |
Kim SY; Department of Astronomy, The Ohio State University, 140 W. 18th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA.; Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics, The Ohio State University, 191 W. Woodruff Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA., Peter AHG; Department of Astronomy, The Ohio State University, 140 W. 18th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA.; Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics, The Ohio State University, 191 W. Woodruff Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA.; Department of Physics, The Ohio State University, 191 W. Woodruff Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA., Hargis JR; Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA. |
| Abstrakt: |
A critical challenge to the cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm is that there are fewer satellites observed around the Milky Way than found in simulations of dark matter substructure. We show that there is a match between the observed satellite counts corrected by the detection efficiency of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (for luminosities L≳340 L_{⊙}) and the number of luminous satellites predicted by CDM, assuming an empirical relation between stellar mass and halo mass. The "missing satellites problem," cast in terms of number counts, is thus solved. We also show that warm dark matter models with a thermal relic mass smaller than 4 keV are in tension with satellite counts, putting pressure on the sterile neutrino interpretation of recent x-ray observations. Importantly, the total number of Milky Way satellites depends sensitively on the spatial distribution of satellites, possibly leading to a "too many satellites" problem. Measurements of completely dark halos below 10^{8} M_{⊙}, achievable with substructure lensing and stellar stream perturbations, are the next frontier for tests of CDM. |
