Extragalactic Stellar Tidal Streams in the Dark Energy Survey

Abstract

Stellar tidal streams are a key tracer of galaxy evolution and have the potential to provide an indirect means for tracing dark matter. For the Local Group, many diffuse substructures have been identified and their link to galaxy evolution has been traced. However, an analysis of a larger sample is required to better probe the frequency and characteristics of these streams to verify the predictions of the Lambda-CDM model and its implementation in cosmological simulations. For that purpose, we are carrying out the first systematic survey of faint stellar debris from tidally disrupted dwarf satellites around nearby galaxies up to a distance of 100 Mpc. In this paper, we present a catalogue with the results of the first harvest of stellar tidal streams found by visual inspection in deep images of ~ 700 galaxies from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We include a photometric characterisation of the streams obtained by measuring their surface brightnesses and colours. We found a total of 63 streams in our sample at distances between 40 and 100 Mpc, including 59 which were not previously reported. We measured their average surface brightness for the grz bands, to be 28.35+/-0.20, 27.81+/-0.13 and 27.62+/-0.09 mag arcsec^-2, respectively. By applying a statistical analysis to our findings, we obtained a stream detection frequency of 9.1% +/- 1.1% , in agreement with previous studies. We identified stream progenitors in 5-14% of our stream sample, depending on the confidence level. The first catalogue of streams in the Local Universe presented here will be complemented by future stream surveys within the Stellar Stream Legacy Survey. In this work we have learnt that the faintest measured stream surface brightness can be significantly brighter than the surface brightness limit of an image measured at pixel level, mainly due to correlated noise present in the images.

20 pages with 16 figures, plus Appendices: 27 pages in total

References in corpus (40)

• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
• Measuring Reddening with SDSS Stellar Spectra and Recalibrating SFD
• The Optical and Near-Infrared Properties of Galaxies: I. Luminosity and Stellar Mass Functions
• Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys
• The Field of Streams: Sagittarius and its Siblings
• HyperLEDA. III. The catalogue of extragalactic distances
• The Absolute Magnitude of the Sun in Several Filters
• Tracing Galaxy Formation with Stellar Halos II: Relating Substructure in Phase- and Abundance-Space to Accretion Histories
• Stellar Tidal Streams in Spiral Galaxies of the Local Volume: A Pilot Survey with Modest Aperture Telescopes
• The Atlas3D project -- XXIX. The new look of early-type galaxies and surrounding fields disclosed by extremely deep optical images
• Stellar Streams Discovered in the Dark Energy Survey
• The Frequency of Tidal Features Associated with Nearby Luminous Elliptical Galaxies from a Statistically Complete Sample
• The SAGA Survey: I. Satellite Galaxy Populations Around Eight Milky Way Analogs
• Galaxy growth in the concordance $\Lambda$CDM cosmology
• The SAGA Survey. II. Building a Statistical Sample of Satellite Systems around Milky Way-like Galaxies
• Noise Based Detection and Segmentation of Nebulous Objects
• The Streams of the Gaping Abyss: A population of entangled stellar streams surrounding the Inner Galaxy
• Charting the Galactic acceleration field I. A search for stellar streams with Gaia DR2 and EDR3 with follow-up from ESPaDOnS and UVES
• Galactic cirri in deep optical imaging
• $S^5$: The Orbital and Chemical Properties of One Dozen Stellar Streams
• Probing the merger history of red early-type galaxies with their faint stellar substructures
• Preparing for low surface brightness science with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory: characterisation of tidal features from mock images
• Tidal Features at 0.05<z<0.45 in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program: Properties and Formation Channels
• Hidden depths in the local Universe: The Stellar Stream Legacy Survey
• The Origin of Faint Tidal Features Around Galaxies in the RESOLVE Survey
• Systematic search for tidal features around nearby galaxies: I. Enhanced SDSS imaging of the Local Volume
• Tidal streams around galaxies in the SDSS DR7 archive
• Characterization of Low Surface Brightness structures in annotated deep images
• Streams on FIRE: Populations of Detectable Stellar Streams in the Milky Way and FIRE
• Optimising and comparing source extraction tools using objective segmentation quality criteria
• Extremely massive disc galaxies in the nearby Universe form through gas-rich minor mergers
• Stellar masses, sizes, and radial profiles for 465 nearby early-type galaxies: an extension to the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S${}^4$G)
• Euclid: Early Release Observations -- Deep anatomy of nearby galaxies
• Identification of tidal features in deep optical galaxy images with Convolutional Neural Networks
• A giant umbrella-like stellar stream around the tidal ring galaxy NGC 922
• DELVE-ing into the Jet: a thin stellar stream on a retrograde orbit at 30 kpc
• Sky Subtraction in an Era of Low Surface Brightness Astronomy
• The ACTIONFINDER: An unsupervised deep learning algorithm for calculating actions and the acceleration field from a set of orbit segments
• Remnants of recent mergers in nearby early-type galaxies and their classification
• A search for stellar tidal streams around Milky Way analogues from the SAGA sample

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Auriga Streams I: disrupting satellites surrounding Milky Way-mass haloes at multiple resolutions
• Extragalactic Stellar Tidal Streams: Observations meet Simulation
• Low Surface Brightness structures from annotated deep CFHT images: effects of the host galaxy's properties and environment
• STRRINGS: STReams in Residual Images of Nearby GalaxieS
• Stellar tidal streams around nearby spiral galaxies with deep imaging from amateur telescopes
• A stellar stream around the spiral galaxy Messier 61 in Rubin First Look imaging
• Environmental Invariance of the Galaxy Size-Mass Relation
• A Tale of NGC 3785: The Formation of an Ultra-Diffuse Galaxy at the end of the Longest Tidal Tail
• Nested, asymmetric H-He circumstellar shells in the Type Icn/Ibn SN 2024abvb
• Constraining the population of dark matter halo shapes using hierarchical inference with extragalactic stellar streams
• A Long Tidal Feature Extending from a Low-Redshift Galaxy Revealed in Rubin Data Preview 1 Imaging
• Stellar streams around dwarf galaxies in the Local Universe