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

Müller, Oliver, Pawlowski, Marcel S., Lelli, Federico, Fahrion, Katja, Rejkuba, Marina, Hilker, Michael, Kanehisa, Jamie, Libeskind, Noam and Jerjen, Helmut 2021. The coherent motion of Cen A dwarf satellite galaxies remains a challenge for ΛCDM cosmology. Astronomy and Astrophysics 645 , L5. 10.1051/0004-6361/202039973

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Additional Information:	Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)
Publisher:	EDP Sciences
ISSN:	0004-6361
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	28 July 2021
Date of Acceptance:	14 December 2020
Last Modified:	30 May 2023 02:41
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/142981

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