The origin of low-surface-brightness galaxies in the dwarf regime

Copyright 2021 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Low-surface-brightness galaxies (LSBGs) -- defined as systems that are fainter than the surface-brightness limits of past wide-area surveys -- form the overwhelming majority of galaxies in the dwarf regime (M* < 10^9 MSun). Using NewHorizon, a high-resolution cosmological simulation, we study the origin of LSBGs and explain why LSBGs at similar stellar mass show the large observed spread in surface brightness. New Horizon galaxies populate a well-defined locus in the surface brightness -- stellar mass plane, with a spread of ~3 mag arcsec^-2, in agreement with deep SDSS Stripe data. Galaxies with fainter surface brightnesses today are born in regions of higher dark-matter density. This results in faster gas accretion and more intense star formation at early epochs. The stronger resultant supernova feedback flattens gas profiles at a faster rate which, in turn, creates shallower stellar profiles (i.e. more diffuse systems) more rapidly. As star formation declines towards late epochs (z