DWARF GALAXY CLUSTERING AND MISSING SATELLITES

Abstract

At redshifts around 0.1 the CFHT Legacy Survey Deep fields contain some 6x10^4 galaxies spanning the mass range from 10^5 to 10^12 Msun. We measure the stellar mass dependence of the two point correlation using angular measurements to largely bypass the errors, approximately 0.02 in the median, of the photometric redshifts. Inverting the power-law fits with Limber's equation we find that the auto-correlation length increases from a very low 0.4hMpc at 10^5.5 Msun to the conventional 4.5hMpc at 10^10.5 Msun. The power law fit to the correlation function has a slope which increases from gamma approximately 1.6 at high mass to gamma approximately 2.3 at low mass. The spatial cross-correlation of dwarf galaxies with more massive galaxies shows fairly similar trends, with a steeper radial dependence at low mass than predicted in numerical simulations of sub-halos within galaxy halos. To examine the issue of missing satellites we combine the cross-correlation measurements with our estimates of the low mass galaxy number density. We find on the average there are 60+/-20 dwarfs in sub-halos with M(total) > 10^7 Msun for a typical Local Group M(total)/M(stars)=30, corresponding to M/L_V approximately 100 for a galaxy with no recent star formation. The number of dwarfs per galaxy is about a factor of two larger than currently found for the Milky Way. Nevertheless, the average dwarf counts are about a factor of 30 below LCDM simulation results. The divergence from LCDM predictions is one of slope of the relation, approximately dN/dlnM approximately -0.5 rather than the predicted -0.9, not sudden onset at some characteristic scale. The dwarf galaxy star formation rates span the range from passive to bursting, which suggests that there are few completely dark halos.