Stellar Streams Discovered in the Dark Energy Survey

By N. Shipp, Alex Drlica-Wagner, E. Balbinot, P. Ferguson, D. Erkal, Ting S. Li, K. Bechtol, V. Belokurov, B. Buncher, Daniela Carollo and 75 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2018

193 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We perform a search for stellar streams around the Milky Way using the first 3 yr of multiband optical imaging data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We use DES data covering ∼5000 deg2 to a depth of g > 23.5 with a relative photometric calibration uncertainty of <1%. This data set yields unprecedented sensitivity to the stellar density field in the southern celestial hemisphere, enabling the detection of faint stellar streams to a heliocentric distance of ∼50 kpc. We search for stellar streams using a matched filter in color–magnitude space derived from a synthetic isochrone of an old, metal-poor stellar population. Our detection technique recovers four previously known thin stellar streams: Phoenix, ATLAS, Tucana III, and a possible extension of Molonglo. In addition, we report the discovery of 11 new stellar streams. In general, the new streams detected by DES are fainter, more distant, and lower surface brightness than streams detected by similar techniques in previous photometric surveys. As a by-product of our stellar stream search, we find evidence for extratidal stellar structure associated with four globular clusters: NGC 288, NGC 1261, NGC 1851, and NGC 1904. The ever-growing sample of stellar streams will provide insight into the formation of the Galactic stellar halo, the Milky Way gravitational potential, and the large- and small-scale distribution of dark matter around the Milky Way.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9ed0505f48ed27186762ab84ea21c667392d10a

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Citations in the corpus

Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys (2018, background): “…have revolutionized the study of the Milky Way, finding numerous stellar halo streams (e.g., Newberg et al. 2002; Yanny et al. 2003; Grillmair 2009; Bernard et al. 2016; Shipp et al. 2018) and dwarf galaxies (Willman et al. 2005; Laevens et al. 2014; Drlica-Wagner et al. 2015; Bechtol et al. 2015).”
The total mass of the Large Magellanic Cloud from its perturbation on the Orphan stream (2018, background): “The streams in the Southern Galactic hemisphere are natural candidates since they have had closer passages with the LMC. Tucana III is an especially good candidate given its close passage with the LMC (Erkal et al. 2018; Simon 2018; Fritz et al. 2018), as are the 11 streams recently discovered in th”
Milky Way Satellite Census. I. The Observational Selection Function for Milky Way Satellites in DES Y3 and Pan-STARRS DR1 (2019, methodology): “The construction of the extended classification variable is described in Section 2 of (Shipp et al. 2018).”