Galactic halo stellar structures in the Triangulum-Andromeda region
Abstract
This letter reports on the Galactic stellar structures that appear in the foreground of our Canada-France-Hawaii-Telecopse/MegaCam survey of the halo of the Andromeda galaxy. We recover the main sequence and main sequence turn-off of the Triangulum-Andromeda structure recently found by Majewski and collaborators at a heliocentric distance of ~20 kpc. The survey also reveals another less populated main sequence at fainter magnitudes that could correspond to a more distant stellar structure at ~28 kpc. Both structures are smoothly distributed over the ~76 sq. deg. covered by the survey although the closer one shows an increase in density by a factor of ~2 towards the North-West. The discovery of a stellar structure behind the Triangulum-Andromeda structure that itself appears behind the low-latitude stream that surrounds the Galactic disk gives further evidence that the inner halo of the Milky Way is of a spatially clumpy nature.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0703506,
title = {Galactic halo stellar structures in the Triangulum-Andromeda region},
author = {Nicolas F. Martin and Rodrigo A. Ibata and Mike Irwin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0703506},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
accepted for publication in ApJL, 4 pages, 4 figures. Significant changes including a larger dataset and a more thorough discussion