The feeble giant. Discovery of a large and diffuse Milky Way dwarf galaxy in the constellation of Crater

By G. Torrealba, Sergey E. Koposov, V. Belokurov, M. Irwin. 2016

182 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We announce the discovery of the Crater 2 dwarf galaxy, identified in imaging data of the VST ATLAS survey. Given its half-light radius of ~1100 pc, Crater 2 is the fourth largest dwarf in the Milky Way, surpassed only by the LMC, SMC and the Sgr dwarf. With a total luminosity of $M_V\approx-8$, this satellite galaxy is also one of the lowest surface brightness dwarfs. Falling under the nominal detection boundary of 30 mag arcsec$^{-2}$, it compares in nebulosity to the recently discovered Tuc 2 and Tuc IV and UMa II. Crater 2 is located ~120 kpc from the Sun and appears to be aligned in 3-D with the enigmatic globular cluster Crater, the pair of ultra-faint dwarfs Leo IV and Leo V and the classical dwarf Leo II. We argue that such arrangement is probably not accidental and, in fact, can be viewed as the evidence for the accretion of the Crater-Leo group.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e0c098371c7a008ccf59df6fdb69d26a425fb56

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Gaia DR2 proper motions of dwarf galaxies within 420 kpc (2018, background): “For Aquarius II just the two brightest members (according to the binary classification) of Torrealba et al. (2016b) have matches in GDR2.”
A MegaCam Survey of Outer Halo Satellites. III. Photometric and Structural Parameters (2018, background): “Two objects discovered in VST/ATLAS imaging: Crt II (Torrealba et al. 2016a) and Aqu II (Torrealba et al. 2016b).”
Farthest Neighbor: The Distant Milky Way Satellite Eridanus II (2016, background): “…data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES; Bechtol et al. 2015; Koposov et al. 2015; Drlica-Wagner et al. 2015a; Kim & Jerjen 2015) and other large optical surveys (Martin et al. 2015; Laevens et al. 2015a,b; Kim et al. 2015a,b; Torrealba et al. 2016a,b; Homma et al. 2016; Drlica-Wagner et al. 2016).”
Milky Way Satellite Census. I. The Observational Selection Function for Milky Way Satellites in DES Y3 and Pan-STARRS DR1 (2019, background): “More recently, searches using data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES; Bechtol et al. 2015; Koposov et al. 2015; Kim & Jerjen 2015b; Drlica-Wagner et al. 2015; Luque et al. 2016), other DECam surveys (e.g., SMASH, MagLiteS, and DELVE; Martin et al. 2015; Drlica-Wagner et al. 2016; Torrealba et al. 201”
The hidden giant: discovery of an enormous Galactic dwarf satellite in Gaia DR2 (2018, background): “L ∼ 105 L (see Torrealba et al. 2016a).”
Milky Way Satellite Census. II. Galaxy–Halo Connection Constraints Including the Impact of the Large Magellanic Cloud (2019, background): “Meanwhile, other surveys with the Dark ∗ NHFP Einstein Fellow Energy Camera and VST ATLAS have recently discovered several additional satellites (Martin et al. 2015; Torrealba et al. 2016a,b, 2018; Drlica-Wagner et al. 2016; Koposov et al. 2018; Mau et al. 2019).”