Andrew Wetzel edited abstract.tex  about 9 years ago

Commit id: 1d44505692fae5a3ff9a51977cd90c644ad24c14

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In the Local Group, nearly all of the dwarf galaxies ($\mstar<10^9\msun$) at $\mstar\lesssim10^9\msun$  that are satellites within $300\kpc$ (the virial radius) of the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31) have quiescent star formation and little-to-no cold gas. This contrasts strongly with more comparatively  isolated dwarf galaxies, which are almost all actively star-forming and gas-rich. This near dichotomy implies that environmental processes within the halos of the MW and M31 \emph{rapidly} remove gas and quench star formation in satellite dwarfs after infall.  We combine the observed quiescent fractions for satellites of the MW/M31 with the virial-infall times of satellites in from  the ELVIS suite of cosmological simulations of MW/M31-like halos to determine the typical timescales over which environmental processes quench satellite dwarf galaxies. The quenching timescales at $\mstar<10^8\msun$ are short, $<2-3\gyr$, depending somewhat on whether environmental preprocessing in lower-mass groups is important, and are comparable to a virial-radius crossing time.  We compare with timescales for more massive satellites from the literature, which implies that environmental quenching timescale increases rapidly with satellite mass to $\approx9.5\gyr$ at $\mstar\approx10^9\msun$, but it then rapidly decreases with mass to less than $5\gyr$ at $\mstar>5\times 10^9\msun$.  Thus, satellites with masses similar to the Magellanic Clouds exhibit the longest environmental quenching timescales.