EDGE-INFERNO: Simulating every observable star in faint dwarf galaxies and their consequences for resolved-star photometric surveys

Abstract

Interpretation of data from faint dwarf galaxies is made challenging by observations limited to only the brightest stars. We present a major improvement to tackle this challenge by undertaking zoomed cosmological simulations that resolve the evolution of all individual stars more massive than $0.5\,{\rm M}_{\odot}$, thereby explicitly tracking all observable stars for the Hubble time. For the first time, we predict observable color-magnitude diagrams and the spatial distribution of $\approx 100,000$ stars within four faint ($M_{\star} \approx 10^5 \, \,{\rm M}_{\odot}$) dwarf galaxies directly from their cosmological initial conditions. In all cases, simulations predict complex light profiles with multiple components, implying that typical observational measures of structural parameters can make total V-band magnitudes appear up to 0.5 mag dimmer compared to estimates from simulations. Furthermore, when only small ($\lessapprox100$) numbers of stars are observable, shot noise from realizations of the color-magnitude diagram introduces uncertainties comparable to the population scatter in, e.g., total magnitude, half-light radius, and mean iron abundance measurements. Estimating these uncertainties with fully self-consistent mass growth, star formation and chemical enrichment histories paves the way for more robust interpretation of dwarf galaxy data.