Forecasts for Galaxy Formation and Dark Matter Constraints from Dwarf Galaxy Surveys

Understand

The abundance of faint dwarf galaxies is determined by the underlying population of low-mass dark matter (DM) halos and the efficiency of galaxy formation in these systems.

• Here, we quantify potential galaxy formation and DM constraints from future dwarf satellite galaxy surveys.
• We generate satellite populations using a suite of Milky Way (MW)--mass cosmological zoom-in simulations and an empirical galaxy--halo connection model, and assess sensitivity to galaxy formation and DM signals when marginalizing over galaxy--halo connection uncertainties.
• We find that a survey of all satellites around one MW-mass host can constrain a galaxy formation cutoff at peak virial masses of $M_{50}=10^8~M_{\mathrm{\odot}}$ at the $1\sigma$ level; however, a tail toward low $M_{50}$ prevents a $2\sigma$ measurement.