The coherent motion of Cen A dwarf satellite galaxies remains a challenge for ΛcDM cosmology

Oliver Müller, Marcel S. Pawlowski, Federico Lelli, Katja Fahrion, Marina Rejkuba, Michael Hilker, Jamie Kanehisa, Noam Libeskind, Helmut Jerjen

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    44 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    The plane-of-satellites problem is one of the most severe small-scale challenges for the standard Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) cosmological model: Several dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way and Andromeda co-orbit in thin, planar structures. A similar case has been identified around the nearby elliptical galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A). In this Letter, we study the satellite system of Cen A, adding twelve new galaxies with line-of-sight velocities from VLT/MUSE observations. We find that 21 out of 28 dwarf galaxies with measured velocities share a coherent motion. Similarly, flattened and coherently moving structures are found only in 0.2% of Cen A analogs in the Illustris-TNG100 cosmological simulation, independently of whether we use its dark-matter-only or hydrodynamical run. These analogs are not co-orbiting, and they arise only by chance projection, thus they are short-lived structures in such simulations. Our findings indicate that the observed co-rotating planes of satellites are a persistent challenge for ΛCDM, which is largely independent from baryon physics.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article numberL5
    JournalAstronomy and Astrophysics
    Volume645
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2021

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