Dwarf Galaxies in Voids: Dark Matter Halos and Gas Cooling

Galaxy surveys have shown that luminous galaxies are mainly distributed in large filaments and galaxy clusters. The remaining large volumes are virtually devoid of luminous galaxies. This is in concordance with the formation of the large-scale structure in Uni-verse as derived from cosmological simulations. How-ever, the numerical results indicate that cosmologi-cal voids are abundantly populated with dark matter haloes which may in principle host dwarf galaxies. Observational efforts have in contrast revealed, that voids are apparently devoid of dwarf galaxies. We investigate the formation of dwarf galaxies in voids by hydrodynamical cosmological simulations. Due to the cosmic ultra-violet background radiation low-mass haloes show generally are reduced baryon frac-tion. We determine the characteristic mass below which dwarf galaxies are baryon deficient. We show that the circular velocity below which the accretion of baryons is suppressed is approximately 40 km s−1. The suppressed baryon accretion is caused by the photo-heating due to the UV-background. We set up a spherical halo model and show that the effective equation of state of the gas in the periphery of dwarf galaxies determines the characteristic mass. This im-plies that any process which heats the gas around dwarf galaxies increases the characteristic mass and thus reduces the number of observable dwarf galax-ies. send offprint requests to