Cats and Dogs, Hair and a Hero: A Quintet of New Milky Way Companions

By V. Belokurov, D. Zucker, N. Evans, J. Kleyna, Sergey E. Koposov, S. Hodgkin, Mike Irwin, G. Gilmore, Mark I. Wilkinson, M. Fellhauer and 24 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2006

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We present five new satellites of the Milky Way discovered in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) imaging data, four of which were followed up with either the Subaru or the Isaac Newton Telescopes. They include four probable new dwarf galaxies—one each in the constellations of Coma Berenices, Canes Venatici, Leo, and Hercules—together with one unusually extended globular cluster, Segue 1. We provide distances, absolute magnitudes, half-light radii, and color-magnitude diagrams for all five satellites. The morphological features of the color-magnitude diagrams are generally well described by the ridge line of the old, metal-poor globular cluster M92. In the past two years, a total of 10 new Milky Way satellites with effective surface brightness μv ≳ 28 mag arcsec-2 have been discovered in SDSS data. They are less luminous, more irregular, and apparently more metal-poor than the previously known nine Milky Way dwarf spheroidals. The relationship between these objects and other populations is discussed. We note that there is a paucity of objects with half-light radii between ~40 and ~100 pc. We conjecture that this may represent the division between star clusters and dwarf galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

Globular cluster systems in nearby dwarf galaxies – III. Formation efficiencies of old globular clusters (2010, result): “This is consistent with the fact that the recently found extremely faint Local Group dwarf galaxies do not possess GCs (e.g. Belokurov et al. 2006, 2007; Irwin et al. 2007; Walsh et al. 2007; Willman et al. 2005a,b; Zucker et al. 2006a,b). c© 2009 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–??”
Co-formation of the disc and the stellar halo (2018, background): “Most dwarf spheroidals host stars nearly as old as the Universe itself (see Tolstoy et al. 2009), while many ultra-faint dwarfs appear to have formed the bulk of their stellar populations only slightly less than a Hubble time ago (see e.g. Belokurov et al. 2007; Brown et al. 2014).”
The Pristine survey - I. Mining the Galaxy for the most metal-poor stars (2017, background): “Satellite discoveries in the SDSS (e.g., Belokurov et al. 2007), Pan-STARRS1 (e.g., Laevens et al. 2015), and the Dark Energy Survey (e.g., Bechtol et al. 2015) have provided us with powerful observational constraints in our cosmic backyard, especially to understand the faint end of galaxy…”
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THE INVISIBLES: A DETECTION ALGORITHM TO TRACE THE FAINTEST MILKY WAY SATELLITES (2008, background): “Willman 1, Segue 1 and Boötes II (Willman et al. 2005a; Belokurov et al. 2007; Walsh et al. 2007a) occupy a region of size-luminosity space not previously known to be inhabited by old stellar populations, at the intersection of MW dSphs and globular clusters.”
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Too big to fail in the Local Group (2014, background): “Though the known count of MW satellites has more than doubled in the past ten years, all of E-mail: sgarriso@uci.edu †Center for Galaxy Evolution Fellow. these new satellites have been of fairly low luminosity (e.g. Willman et al. 2005; Belokurov et al. 2006, 2007).”
Formation of isolated dwarf galaxies with feedback (2009, methodology): “The observational sample is identical to the one used by Strigari et al. (2008), and comprises 8 ‘classical’ dwarf spheroidals, as well as 10 of the newly-discovered ultra-faint galaxies (Willman et al. 2005; Belokurov et al. 2007).”
PRE-REIONIZATION FOSSILS, ULTRA-FAINT DWARFS, AND THE MISSING GALACTIC SATELLITE PROBLEM (2008, background): “…the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and surveys of the halo around M31, resulting in the discovery of 12 new ultra-faint Milky Way satellites (Belokurov et al. 2006, 2007; Irwin et al. 2007; Walsh et al. 2007; Willman et al. 2005b, 2005a; Zucker et al. 2006b, 2006a; Geha et al. 2009) and six…”
The Luminosity Function of the Milky Way Satellites (2007, methodology): “From this function, we can construct the maximal accessible volume within the DR5 footprint (which covers 1/5 of the sky) as a function of galaxy luminosity, namely Vmax(MV ) = 4π/3 fDR5 r 3 max(MV )(see Figure 13), where fDR5 is the fraction of the sky covered by DR5 .”
A UNIVERSAL MASS PROFILE FOR DWARF SPHEROIDAL GALAXIES? (2009, background): “…J. I., Feltzing, S., Koch, A., Gilmore, G. F., Grebel, E. K., & Lundström, I. 2009, ApJ, 706, L150 Belokurov, V., Walker, M. G., Evans, N. W., Gilmore, G., Irwin, M. J., Mateo, M., Mayer, L., Olszewski, E., Bechtold, J., & Pickering, T. 2009, ArXiv:0903.0818 Belokurov et al. 2007, ApJ, 654, 897 —.”
The stellar halo of the Galaxy (2008, methodology): “Another example of a narrow tidal tail is the Orphan-Stream (Grillmair 2006b; Belokurov et al. 2007c), whose progenitor may well have been a dwarf spheroidal-like object accreted by the Galaxy several Gyr ago (Sales et al. 2008).”
Dark Matter Subhalos and the Dwarf Satellites of the Milky Way (2008, background): “…is limited by three main uncertainties: 1) the old tally of Milky Way luminous satellites is very incomplete, and is being rapidly revised (e.g. Belokurov et al. 2007) by the discovery of a new, large population of ultra-faint dwarfs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS); 2) in cosmological N…”
Velocity Dispersion Profiles of Seven Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies (2007, background): “Spanning the absolute magnitude range −13 ≤ MV ≤ −4 (Mateo 1998; Belokurov et al. 2007), dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies represent the extreme end of the galaxy luminosity function.”