2014MNRAS.441..933X

The emptiness of the Local Void has been put forward as a serious challenge to the current standard paradigm of structure formation in Λcolddarkmatter (CDM). We use a high-resolution cosmological N-body simulation, the Millennium-II run, combined with a sophisticated semi-analytic galaxy formation model, to explore statistically whether the Local Void is allowed within our current knowledge of galaxy formation in ΛCDM. We find that about 14 per cent of the Local Group analogue systems (11 of 77) in our simulation are associated with nearby low-density regions having size and `emptiness' similar to those of the observed Local Void. This suggests that, rather than a crisis of the ΛCDM, the emptiness of the Local Void is indeed a success of the standard ΛCDM theory. The paucity of faint galaxies in such voids results from a combination of two factors: a lower amplitude of the halo mass function in the voids than in the field, and a lower galaxy formation efficiency in the void haloes due to halo assembly bias effects. While the former is the dominated factor, the later also plays a sizeable role. The halo assembly bias effect results in a stellar mass fraction 25 per cent lower for void galaxies when compared to field galaxies with the same halo mass.