Missing Satellites Problem: Completeness Corrections to the Number of Satellite Galaxies in the Milky Way are Consistent with Cold Dark Matter Predictions.

A critical challenge to the cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm is that there are fewer satellites observed around the Milky Way than found in simulations of dark matter substructure. We show that there is a match between the observed satellite counts corrected by the detection efficiency of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (for luminosities L≳340  L_{⊙}) and the number of luminous satellites predicted by CDM, assuming an empirical relation between stellar mass and halo mass. The "missing satellites problem," cast in terms of number counts, is thus solved.