Determine the Relative Roles of Gas-Loss Mechanisms in Milky Way Dwarf Satellites

Determine the relative roles of stellar feedback, cosmic reionization, and environmental effects in causing gas loss from Milky Way dwarf spheroidal satellites.

Background

Milky Way dwarf spheroidal galaxies contain little detectable cold gas and little current star formation, but the absence of gas does not identify which physical process removed it or prevented its retention. The paper considers three potentially overlapping mechanisms: internal stellar and supernova feedback, cosmic reionization, and environmental processes such as ram-pressure stripping and tidal interactions after satellite infall.

The analysis evaluates whether cumulative core-collapse supernova energy can reach an order-of-magnitude gas-binding-energy threshold, but it explicitly treats that threshold as a necessary rather than sufficient condition for gas loss and does not reconstruct orbital histories, halo growth, gas reaccretion, or the separate contributions of environmental mechanisms. Consequently, the relative causal importance of these processes remains unresolved.