Andrew Wetzel edited abstract.tex  about 9 years ago

Commit id: 64451bce9041941476f374ce185937670d08f43a

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In the Local Group, nearly all of the dwarf galaxies ($\mstar < 10 ^ 9 \msun$) that are satellites within $300 \kpc$ (approximately 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 the more isolated dwarf galaxies at larger distances, 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} removed remove  gas and quenched quench  star formation in such their  satellites after infall. We combine the observed quiescent fractions of satellites of the MW/M31 with the virial-infall times of satellites in the ELVIS suite of cosmological simulations of MW/M31-like halos to infer statistically the timescales over which satellite dwarf galaxies are environmentally quenched.  The quenching timescales at $\mstar<10^8\msun$ are short: $< 2 - 3 \gyr$, depending on whether environmental preprocessing in lower-mass groups is important.  We compare with the timescales for more massive satellites from the literature, which suggests that environmental quenching timescales are longest ($\approx 9.5 \gyr$) for satellites at $\mstar \approx 10 ^ 9 \msun$ and decrease to $<5\gyr$ replace_contentlt;5\gyr$  at $\mstar>5\times 10^9\msun$.