CCA Colloquium: Laura Sales

Title: Baryonic solutions and challenges for cosmological models of dwarf galaxies.

Abstract: Dwarf galaxies pose strong constraints to the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model, with several outstanding challenges still to be reconciled between theoretical models and observations. I will discuss some of these tensions, including the mapping between stellar mass and halo mass, dark matter cores, morphology of dwarfs and diversity of rotation curves. I will highlight the important role of modeling the physics of baryons in galaxy formation simulations to compare observations to cosmological predictions. From such comparison, a few observational milestones arise as promising probes of the LCDM model: the census of ultrafaint galaxies beyond the Milky Way, phase-space studies of stars in nearby cored dwarfs, and measurements of the degree of burstiness in the star formation of low mass galaxies.