Environmental Mechanisms Shaping the Nature of Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies The View of Computer Simulations.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Astronomy Volume 2010, Article ID 278434, 21 pages doi:10.1155/2010/278434 Review Article Environmental Mechanisms Shaping the Nature of Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies: The View of Computer Simulations Lucio Mayer Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland ¨ ¨ Correspondence should be addressed to Lucio Mayer, lmayer@physik.unizh.ch Received 14 June 2009; Revised 17 September 2009; Accepted 1 October 2009 Academic Editor: Andrey V. Kravtsov Copyright © 2010 Lucio Mayer. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We review numerical works carried out over the last decade on the role of environmental mechanisms in shaping nature of the faintest galaxies known, dwarf spheroidals (dSphs). The combination of tidally induced morphological transformation, termed tidal stirring, with mass loss due to tidal and ram-pressure stripping aided by heating due to the cosmic ionizing background can turn late-type dwarfs resembling present-day dIrrs into classic dSphs. The time of infall into the primary halo is shown to be a key parameter. Dwarfs accreting at z 1, when the cosmic ultraviolet ionizing flux was much higher than today, and was thus able to keep the gas in the dwarfs warm and diffuse, were rapidly stripped of their baryons via ram pressure and tidal forces, producing very dark-matter-dominated objects with truncated star-formation histories, such as the Draco dSph. The low star- formation efficiency expected in such low