The Exploration of Local VolumE Satellites (ELVES) Survey: A Nearly Volume-Limited Sample of Nearby Dwarf Satellite Systems

Abstract

We present the final results of the Exploration of Local VolumE Satellites (ELVES) Survey, a survey of the dwarf satellites of a nearly volume-limited sample of Milky Way (MW)-like hosts in the Local Volume. Hosts are selected simply via a cut in luminosity (M Ks < −22.1 mag) and distance (D < 12 Mpc). We have cataloged the satellites of 25 of the 31 such hosts, with another five taken from the literature. All hosts are surveyed out to at least 150 projected kpc (∼ R vir /2) with the majority surveyed to 300 kpc (∼ R vir ). Satellites are detected using a consistent semi-automated algorithm specialized for low surface brightness dwarfs. As shown through extensive tests with injected galaxies, the catalogs are complete to M V ∼ −9 mag and µ 0,V ∼ 26.5 mag arcsec −2 . Candidates are confirmed to be real satellites through distance measurements including redshift, tip of the red giant branch, and surface brightness fluctuations. Across all 30 surveyed hosts, there are 338 confirmed satellites with a further 105 candidates awaiting distance measurement. For the vast majority of these, we provide consistent multi-band Sérsic photometry. We show that satellite abundance correlates with host mass, with the MW being quite typical amongst comparable systems, and that satellite quenched fraction rises steeply with decreasing satellite mass, mirroring the quenched fraction for the MW and M31. The ELVES survey represents a massive increase in the statistics of surveyed systems with known completeness, and the provided catalogs are a unique dataset to explore various aspects of small-scale structure and dwarf galaxy evolution.

Extinguishing the FIRE: environmental quenching of satellite galaxies around Milky Way-mass hosts in simulations

“…Font et al (2022) found lower quiescent fractions of satellites (𝑀 * ≈ 10 6.5−9.5 M ) around less massive hosts in the ARTEMIS simulations (45 hosts with 8×10 11 < 𝑀 200m /M < 2 × 10 12 ). Carlsten et al (2022) also found a similar trend in observations where the overall quiescent fraction of satellites (𝑀 𝑉 < −9 mag, 𝑀 * 5 × 10 5 M ) increases with the luminosity of observed MW-like hosts (30 host galaxies with 𝑀 𝐾 𝑠 < −22.1 mag) in the Local Volume (𝐷 < 12 Mpc). Taken together, these results could in-dicate that host-mass-dependent quenching could be universal, and based on our results, the host CGM mass (which should correlate with total mass) may drive this trend, likely because of enhanced ram pressure at higher CGM masses.…”

“…This difference in the quiescent fraction of satellites presents a unique tension, given that the host galaxies in SAGA are selected specifically to match the MW's stellar mass, and the number and radial distribution of satellites around SAGA hosts broadly agrees with LG satellites and zoom-in simulations of MW-mass galaxies (e.g., Samuel et al 2020;Font et al 2021). Furthermore, Font et al (2022) used the colors of satellites of MW-mass galaxies in the local Universe, which have been surveyed extensively (e.g., Karachentsev & Kudrya 2014;Müller et al 2015;Danieli et al 2017;Smercina et al 2018;Bennet et al 2019;Crnojević et al 2019;Müller et al 2019;Carlsten et al 2021Carlsten et al , 2022, to estimate their star-forming or quenched status and found broad agreement between the LG and the local Universe, extending the observational tension between the SAGA survey and and other MW-mass galaxies.…”

HI Properties of Satellite Galaxies around Local Volume Hosts

“…More quantitative comparisons may be made using the Exploration of Local VolumE Satellites (ELVES) Survey (Carlsten et al 2022a). The ELVES sample extends the one used in this work and consists of over 300 confirmed satellites around 30 Local Volume hosts with more uniform spatial coverage within 300 kpc and similar photometric completeness, vertical dashed-dotted line in Figure 5.…”

“…Complimentary to these advances on the theoretical front, we are in an era of expanding studies of satellite dwarf galaxies beyond the Local Group that build upon the seminal works of Zaritsky et al (1993Zaritsky et al ( , 1997. These studies, whether via integrated light (Merritt et al 2014;Karachentsev et al 2015;Bennet et al 2017;Javanmardi et al 2016;Carlsten et al 2019;Müller et al 2017;Smercina et al 2018;Geha et al 2017;Carlsten et al 2022a;Mao et al 2021) or via resolved stars (Chiboucas et al 2009(Chiboucas et al , 2013Carlin et al 2016;Crnojević et al 2016;Crnojević et al 2019;Bennet et al 2019Bennet et al , 2020Mutlu-Pakdil et al 2021, have discovered dozens of new satellites in nearby systems. These growing samples enable increasingly detailed comparisons to the Local Group satellite system.…”

“…Although, by-and-large, massive satellites are gas-rich and lowmass satellites are gas-poor within the Local Group, the threshold within this broad mass range at which the gas richness of the population transitions from low to high is only just beginning to be probed systematically (i.e. Carlsten et al 2020Carlsten et al , 2022a. This "transition" region lies above the stellar masses of the bulk of the Local Group satellites, but below the stellar masses of the bulk of the satellites of Milky Way-like systems that have insofar been detected in the Local Volume (Geha et al 2017;Mao et al 2021).…”