Dwarf galaxies provide unique and rich constraints on galaxy formation and the nature of dark matter. However, the galaxy-halo mass connection at these low-masses still have a lot of uncertainty. With an influx of newly discovered dwarfs near and far, it is becoming increasingly important to place dwarf galaxies in a cosmological context and model their evolution in a self-consistent way. I will introduce a novel framework for connecting dark matter assembly to star formation over the full range of halo masses that host galaxies to shed light on this edge. This approach combines the empirical galaxy halo connection model UniverseMachine (UM) to a set of dark matter zoom-in simulations that can be simultaneously constrained by observations over a vast range of masses, redshift and environment. I will share our latest upgraded UM model that significantly improves on modeling satellite quenching, which is constrained by dwarf galaxies in the Satellite Around Galactic Analogs (SAGA) survey and field galaxies from SDSS. We gain useful insights on the strength of environmental quenching required to explain the difference in quenched fractions of satellites versus isolated dwarfs. Combining this framework with Local Group dwarfs with resolved star formation histories can further probe the transition between environmental and reionization quenching of star formation.
Host: Dandan Xu
