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What can isolated elliptical galaxies tell us about Cold Dark Matter?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2016

Richard R. Lane ,
Tom Richtler  and
Ricardo Salinas
Richard R. Lane
Affiliation:
Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Concepción, Casilla 160 C, Concepción, Chile
Tom Richtler
Affiliation:
Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Concepción, Casilla 160 C, Concepción, Chile
Ricardo Salinas
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
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Abstract

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Due to their environment isolated elliptical galaxies (IEs) should not be undergoing extant evolutionary processes yet many IEs have interacting dwarf companions, and where no merger remnants are visible IEs are often dynamically young. Furthermore, some IEs do not require dark matter to explain their dynamics. However, according to Cold Dark Matter (CDM) simulations all elliptical galaxies should be dark matter dominated, even if isolated, and IEs are much rarer in nature than predicted by CDM. Moreover, merging at the ~107 M⊙ level was recently discovered in the M31 system, showing that hierarchical merging may indeed be scale-free, as predicted by CDM. It seems a natural question to ask: what can IEs tell us about CDM? Here we analyse several IEs as probes of CDM. Our results spawn many new questions.

Keywords

galaxies: elliptical and lenticular, cDgalaxies: kinematics and dynamicsgalaxies: structuregalaxies: evolutiongalaxies: dwarfgalaxies: star clustersdark matter
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 11 , Issue S317: The General Assembly of Galaxy Halos: Structure, Origin and Evolution , August 2015 , pp. 326 - 327
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2016 

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