Related papers: How Common are the Magellanic Clouds?
In this study, we conduct a pilot program aimed at the red supergiant population of the Magellanic Clouds. We intend to extend the current known sample to the unexplored low end of the brightness distribution of these stars, building a more…
We performed a search for new dwarf galaxies in a direction towards the southwestern part of the Local Void using the data on DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys. In a sky area of $\sim1000$ square degrees, we discovered 12 candidates to nearby…
White dwarf stars are a well-established tool for studying Galactic stellar populations. Two white dwarfs in a tight binary system offer us an additional messenger - gravitational waves - for exploring the Milky Way and its immediate…
It was first observed in the 1970s that the dwarf galaxies surrounding our Milky Way, so-called satellites, appear to be arranged in a thin, vast plane. Similar discoveries have been made around additional galaxies in the local Universe…
Quantifying the connection between galaxies and their host dark matter halos has been key for testing cosmological models on various scales. Below $M_\star \sim 10^9\,M_\odot$, such studies have primarily relied on the satellite galaxy…
We present the discovery of three new Milky Way satellites from our search for compact stellar overdensities in the photometric catalog of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 (Pan-STARRS 1, or PS1) 3pi survey. The…
The Milky Way is surrounded by nine or more dwarf-spheroidal (dSph) satellite galaxies that appear to consist primarily of dark matter. Here I summarise research that shows that initially spherical bound low-mass satellites without dark…
We investigate the formation and observable properties of faint satellite galaxies (M$_\rm V > -3$) in Milky Way-like halos using the semi-analytic galaxy formation model Galacticus. The ability of the smallest dark matter halos to form…
We have imaged the entire Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), one of the two nearest star-forming dwarf galaxies, in all seven IRAC and MIPS bands. The low mass and low metallicity (1/6 solar) of the SMC make it the best local analog for…
Accretion of minor satellites has been postulated as the most likely mechanism to explain the significant size evolution of the massive galaxies over cosmic time. Using a sample of 629 massive (Mstar~10^11 Msun) galaxies from the…
A recent observational study found that the projected spatial distributions of the satellites of bright, isolated host galaxies tend to be lopsided with respect to the locations of the hosts. Here, we examine the spatial distributions of…
The spatial distribution of satellite galaxies around pairs of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have been found to bulge significantly towards the respective partner. Highly anisotropic, planar distributions of satellite…
We present an analysis of the distribution of structural properties for Milky Way-mass halos in the Millennium-II Simulation (MS-II). This simulation of structure formation within the standard LCDM cosmology contains thousands of Milky…
Planes of satellites are observed around many galaxies. However, these observations are still considered a point of tension for the $\Lambda$CDM paradigm. We use the fully hydrodynamical cosmological $\Lambda$CDM state-of-the-art simulation…
Isolated dwarf galaxies usually exhibit robust star formation but satellite dwarf galaxies are often devoid of young stars, even in Milky Way-mass groups. Dwarf galaxies thus offer an important laboratory of the environmental processes that…
While recent sky surveys have uncovered large numbers of ever fainter Milky Way satellites, their classification as star clusters, low-luminosity galaxies, or tidal overdensities remains often unclear. Likewise, their contributions to the…
We infer the normalization and the radial and angular distributions of the number density of satellites of massive galaxies ($\log_{10}[M_{h}^*/M\odot]>10.5$) between redshifts 0.1 and 0.8 as a function of host stellar mass, redshift,…
Our 'home galaxy' - the Milky Way - is a fairly large spiral galaxy, prototype of the most common morphological class in the local Universe. Although being only a galaxy, it is the only one that can be studied in unique detail: for the…
In the Local Group, quenched gas-poor dwarfs galaxies are most often found close to the Milky Way and Andromeda, while star forming gas-rich ones are located at greater distances. This so-called morphology-density relation is often…
Our Galaxy is surrounded by a large family of dwarf galaxies of which the most massive are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC). Recent evidence suggests that systems with the mass of the Local Group accrete galaxies in…