Local Group star formation in warm and self-interacting dark matter cosmologies

Understand

The nature of the dark matter can affect the collapse time of dark matter haloes, and can therefore be imprinted in observables such as the stellar population ages and star formation histories of dwarf galaxies.

• In this paper we use high resolution hydrodynamical simulations of Local Group-analogue (LG) volumes in cold dark matter (CDM), sterile neutrino warm dark matter (WDM) and self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) models with the EAGLE galaxy formation code to study how galaxy formation times change with dark matter model.
• We are able to identify the same haloes in different simulations, since they share the same initial density field phases.
• We find that the stellar mass of galaxies depends systematically on resolution, and can differ by as much as a factor of two in haloes of a given dark matter mass.