Presentation #552.01 in the session “Satellite Galaxies & Stellar Halos”.
Dwarf galaxies are the building blocks of hierarchical structure formation, and their shallow gravitational potentials makes them extremely sensitive to internal and environmental feedback (eg. star formation, ram pressure stripping). To understand how dwarf galaxies form and evolve, we must study their formation, evolution and fate in a range of environments using a combination of theory and observation. Past, current and ongoing observational surveys have studied the dwarf galaxy populations throughout the Local Volume. In particular, recent surveys (Panoramic Imaging Survey of Centaurus and Sculptor - PISCeS and the Survey of Centaurus A’s Baryonic Structures - SCABS) are building the first complete census of the dwarf satellites of Centaurus A (NGC 5128). Located 3.7 Mpc from the Local Group, Centaurus A is the closest elliptical and its estimated virial mass places it between group and cluster scales, making it ideal for investigating the effects of local environment on the formation and evolution of dwarf galaxy populations. We model the dwarf satellite populations of Centaurus using a suite of high resolution N-body simulations and the semi-analytic model (SAM) Galacticus (Benson, 2010). We determine the best fit parameters for well studied Milky Way satellite, before applying those parameters to generate simulated satellites around our Centaurus A’s analog. Given the relatively low computational cost of N-body simulations and SAMs, we are able to explore the effects of uncertainties in the Centaurus A system, including its relatively unconstrained virial mass. Here we present initial results from our study for the first Centaurus A analog halos.