The Invisibles: A Detection Algorithm to Trace the Faintest Milky Way Satellites

Abstract

[Abridged] A specialized data mining algorithm has been developed using wide-field photometry catalogues, enabling systematic and efficient searches for resolved, extremely low surface brightness satellite galaxies in the halo of the Milky Way (MW). Tested and calibrated with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 6 (SDSS-DR6) we recover all fifteen MW satellites recently detected in SDSS, six known MW/Local Group dSphs in the SDSS footprint, and 19 previously known globular and open clusters. In addition, 30 point source overdensities have been found that correspond to no cataloged objects. The detection efficiencies of the algorithm have been carefully quantified by simulating more than three million model satellites embedded in star fields typical of those observed in SDSS, covering a wide range of parameters including galaxy distance, scale-length, luminosity, and Galactic latitude.

22 pages, submitted to AJ. You can find a version with full resolution figures at http://msowww.anu.edu.au/~jerjen/SMS_papers.html. Replacement version includes small clarification of discussion and astro-ph numbers in references

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Cited by in corpus (29)

• Beasts of the Southern Wild: Discovery of nine Ultra Faint satellites in the vicinity of the Magellanic Clouds
• Constraints on the Dark Matter Particle Mass from the Number of Milky Way Satellites
• A New Faint Milky Way Satellite Discovered in the Pan-STARRS1 3 pi Survey
• Ultra faint dwarfs: probing early cosmic star formation
• Satellite abundances around bright isolated galaxies
• A Hero's Dark Horse: Discovery of an Ultra-Faint Milky Way Satellite in Pegasus
• Too Many, Too Few, or Just Right? The Predicted Number and Distribution of Milky Way Dwarf Galaxies
• A new distant Milky Way globular cluster in the Pan-STARRS1 3π survey
• The Dragonfly Nearby Galaxies Survey. III. The Luminosity Function of the M101 Group
• A New Milky Way Satellite Discovered In The Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey
• Discovery of a new faint dwarf galaxy associated with NGC 253
• The Leo IV dwarf spheroidal galaxy: color-magnitude diagram and pulsating stars
• From Galaxy Clusters to Ultra-Faint Dwarf Spheroidals: A Fundamental Curve Connecting Dispersion-supported Galaxies to Their Dark Matter Halos
• A Hero's Little Horse: Discovery of a Dissolving Star Cluster in Pegasus
• Stacking the Invisibles: A Guided Search for Low-Luminosity Milky Way Satellites
• Dark-matter decays and Milky Way satellite galaxies
• The Role of Baryons in Creating Statistically Significant Planes of Satellites around Milky Way-Mass Galaxies
• Two Local Volume Dwarf Galaxies Discovered in 21 cm Emission: Pisces A and B
• A comprehensive view of the Virgo Stellar Stream
• Milky Way Tomography with K and M Dwarf Stars: the Vertical Structure of the Galactic Disk
• A recently quenched isolated dwarf galaxy outside of the Local Group environment
• Stellar over-densities in the halo: the extent of the Virgo over-density
• Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): detection of low-surface-brightness galaxies from SDSS data
• Disentangling the Virgo Overdensity with RR Lyrae stars
• Re-Examining Astrophysical Constraints on the Dark Matter Model
• Local Group dSph radio survey with ATCA (I): Observations and background sources
• Universal subhalo accretion in cold and warm dark matter cosmologies
• The Hierarchical Structure of Galactic Haloes: Classification and characterisation with Halo-OPTICS
• A Correlated Search for Local Dwarf Galaxies in GALFA-HI and Pan-STARRS