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Planes of satellites are not a problem for (just) ΛCDM

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The existence of planes of satellites has been a cosmological surprise. However, evidence for stable, long-lived satellite planes is generally tenuous, and they are unexpected in all current models of galaxy formation.

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Fig. 1: A Milky-Way-like dark matter halo from the Aquarius simulation suite.

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Acknowledgements

I thank J. Bullock, C. Miller and J. Samuel for helping to shape my views on this topic. This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award AST-1752913, NSF grant AST-1910346, NASA grant NNX17AG29G, and HST-AR-15006, HST-AR-15809, HST-GO-15658, HST-GO-15901, HST-GO-15902, HST-AR-16159 and HST-GO-16226 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555.

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  1. Department of Astronomy, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Michael Boylan-Kolchin

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  1. Michael Boylan-Kolchin
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Correspondence to Michael Boylan-Kolchin.

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Boylan-Kolchin, M. Planes of satellites are not a problem for (just) ΛCDM. Nat Astron 5, 1188–1190 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01467-0

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