Constraining the dark matter halo mass of isolated low-surface-brightness galaxies

Abstract

Recent advancements in the imaging of low-surface-brightness objects revealed numerous ultra-diffuse galaxies in the local Universe. These peculiar objects are unusually extended and faint: their effective radii are comparable to the Milky Way, but their surface brightnesses are lower than that of dwarf galaxies. Their ambiguous properties motivate two potential formation scenarios: the "failed" Milky Way and the dwarf galaxy scenario. In this paper, for the first time, we employ X-ray observations to test these formation scenarios on a sample of isolated, low-surface-brightness galaxies. Since hot gas X-ray luminosities correlate with the dark matter halo mass, "failed" Milky Way-type galaxies, which reside in massive dark matter halos, are expected to have significantly higher X-ray luminosities than dwarf galaxies, which reside in low-mass dark matter halos. We perform X-ray photometry on a subset of low-surface-brightness galaxies identified in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru survey, utilizing the XMM-Newton XXL North survey. We find that none of the individual galaxies show significant X-ray emission. By co-adding the signal of individual galaxies, the stacked galaxies remain undetected and we set an X-ray luminosity upper limit of $L_{0.3-1.2keV}\le 6.2\times 10^{37}(d/65\mathrm{Mpc}{)}^2\mathrm{erg}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}$ for an average isolated low-surface-brightness galaxy. This upper limit is about 40 times lower than that expected in a galaxy with a massive dark matter halo, implying that the majority of isolated low-surface-brightness galaxies reside in dwarf-size dark matter halos.

6 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication to The Astrophysical Journal Letters

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Robust HI kinematics of gas-rich ultra-diffuse galaxies: hints of a weak-feedback formation scenario
• Globular Clusters in Coma Cluster Ultra Diffuse Galaxies (UDGs): Evidence for Two Types of UDG?
• Ultra diffuse galaxies in the MATLAS low-to-moderate density fields
• Dwarf galaxies in the MATLAS survey: Hubble Space Telescope observations of the globular cluster system in the ultra-diffuse galaxy MATLAS-2019
• On the Stellar Kinematics and Mass of the Virgo Ultra-Diffuse Galaxy VCC 1287
• Hyper Suprime-Cam Low Surface Brightness Galaxies II: A Hubble Space Telescope Study of the Globular Cluster Systems of Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies in Groups
• The Archetypal Ultra-Diffuse Galaxy, Dragonfly 44, is not a Dark Milky Way
• Ultraviolet and X-ray Properties of Coma's Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies
• Probing ultra-diffuse galaxies out to the virial radius of the Coma cluster with XMM-Newton