Quantifying Scatter in Galaxy Formation at the Lowest Masses

Abstract

Abstract We predict the stellar mass–halo mass (SMHM) relationship for dwarf galaxies, using simulated galaxies with peak halo masses of M peak = 1011 M ⊙ down into the ultra-faint dwarf range to M peak = 107 M ⊙. Our simulated dwarfs have stellar masses of M star = 790 M ⊙ to 8.2 × 108 M ⊙, with corresponding V-band magnitudes from −2 to −18.5. For M peak > 1010 M ⊙, the simulated SMHM relationship agrees with literature determinations, including exhibiting a small scatter of 0.3 dex. However, the scatter in the SMHM relation increases for lower-mass halos. We first present results for well-resolved halos that contain a simulated stellar population, but recognize that whether a halo hosts a galaxy is inherently mass resolution dependent. We thus adopt a probabilistic model to populate “dark” halos below our resolution limit to predict an “intrinsic” slope and scatter for the SMHM relation. We fit linearly growing log-normal scatter in stellar mass, which grows to more than 1 dex at M peak = 108 M ⊙. At the faintest end of the SMHM relation probed by our simulations, a galaxy cannot be assigned a unique halo mass based solely on its luminosity. Instead, we provide a formula to stochastically populate low-mass halos following our results. Finally, we show that our growing log-normal scatter steepens the faint-end slope of the predicted stellar mass function.