English

Discovery of a cold stellar stream in the ATLAS DR1 data

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2015-06-19 v2

Abstract

We report the discovery of a narrow stellar stream crossing the constellations of Sculptor and Fornax in the Southern celestial hemisphere. The portion of the stream detected in the Data Release 1 photometry of the ATLAS survey is at least 12 degrees long, while its width is \approx 0.25 deg. The Color Magnitude Diagram of this halo sub-structure is consistent with a metal-poor [Fe/H] 1.4\lesssim -1.4 stellar population located at a heliocentric distance of 20 ±\pm 2 kpc. There are three globular clusters that could tentatively be associated with the stream: NGC 7006, NGC 7078 (M15) and Pyxis, but NGC 7006 and 7078 seem to have proper motions incompatible with the stream orbit.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1403.3409,
  title  = {Discovery of a cold stellar stream in the ATLAS DR1 data},
  author = {S. E. Koposov and M. Irwin and V. Belokurov and E. Gonzales-Solares and A. Kupcu Yoldas and J. Lewis and N. Metcalfe and T. Shanks},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.3409},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures, accepted to MNRAS letters