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Title:
A common mass scale for satellite galaxies of the Milky Way
Authors:
Strigari, Louis E.; Bullock, James S.; Kaplinghat, Manoj; Simon, Joshua D.; Geha, Marla; Willman, Beth; Walker, Matthew G.
Affiliation:
AA(Center for Cosmology, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-4574, USA), AB(Center for Cosmology, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-4574, USA), AC(Center for Cosmology, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-4574, USA), AD(Department of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, MS105-24, Pasadena, California 91125, USA), AE(Department of Astronomy, Yale University, PO Box 208101, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8101, USA), AF(Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA), AG(Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0HA, UK)
Publication:
Nature, Volume 454, Issue 7208, pp. 1096-1097 (2008). (Nature Homepage)
Publication Date:
08/2008
Origin:
NATURE
DOI:
10.1038/nature07222
Bibliographic Code:
2008Natur.454.1096S

Abstract

The Milky Way has at least twenty-three known satellite galaxies that shine with luminosities ranging from about a thousand to a billion times that of the Sun. Half of these galaxies were discovered in the past few years in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and they are among the least luminous galaxies in the known Universe. A determination of the mass of these galaxies provides a test of galaxy formation at the smallest scales and probes the nature of the dark matter that dominates the mass density of the Universe. Here we use new measurements of the velocities of the stars in these galaxies to show that they are consistent with them having a common mass of about 107 within their central 300parsecs. This result demonstrates that the faintest of the Milky Way satellites are the most dark-matter-dominated galaxies known, and could be a hint of a new scale in galaxy formation or a characteristic scale for the clustering of dark matter.
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