Related papers: What Sets the Sizes of the Faintest Galaxies?
Dwarf satellite galaxies are thought to be the remnants of the population of primordial structures that coalesced to form giant galaxies like the Milky Way. An early analysis noted that dwarf galaxies may not be isotropically distributed…
The Milky Way's dwarf spheroidal satellites include the nearest, smallest and least luminous galaxies known. They also exhibit the largest discrepancies between dynamical and luminous masses. This article reviews the development of…
The spatial distributions of the most recently discovered ultra faint dwarf satellites around the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are compared to the previously reported discs-of-satellites (DoS) of their host galaxies. In our…
We measure the intrinsic shapes and alignments of the dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies of the Local Group. We find the dSphs of the Milky Way are intrinsically flatter (mean intrinsic ellipticity $\mu_E\sim0.6$) than those of M31…
Milky Way dwarf spheroidal galaxies are the tiniest observed galaxies and are currently associated with the largest fractions of dark matter, which is revealed by their too large velocity dispersions. However, most of them are found near…
The Milky Way satellite dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies are the smallest dark matter dominated systems in the universe. We have underway dynamical studies of the dSph to quantify the shortest scale lengths on which Dark Matter is…
We present a new analysis of the Aquarius simulations done in combination with a semi-analytic galaxy formation model. Our goal is to establish whether the subhalos present in LCDM simulations of Milky Way-like systems could host the dwarf…
This paper introduces new phase-space models of dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs). The stellar component has an isotropic, lowered isothermal (or King) distribution function. A physical basis for the isotropization of stellar velocities is…
We construct axisymmetric mass models for dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies in the Milky Way to obtain plausible limits on the non-spherical structure of their dark halos. This is motivated by the fact that the observed luminous parts of the…
We investigate the non-spherical density structure of dark halos of the dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies in the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies based on revised axisymmetric mass models from our previous work. The models we adopt here…
We investigate the claim that all dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) reside within halos that share a common, universal mass profile as has been derived for dSphs of the Galaxy. By folding in kinematic information for 25 Andromeda dSphs,…
We derive the structural parameters of the recently discovered very low luminosity Milky Way satellites through a Maximum Likelihood algorithm applied to SDSS data. For each satellite, even when only a few tens of stars are available down…
We study the abundance of satellites akin to the brightest, classical dwarf spheroidals around galaxies similar in magnitude and isolation to the Milky Way and M31 in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. From a combination of photometric and…
There are two fundamentally different physical origins of faint satellite galaxies: cosmological sub-structures that contain shining baryons and the fragmentation of gas-rich tidal arms thrown out from interacting galaxies during…
We study the formation histories and present-day structure of satellite galaxies formed in a high resolution hydrodynamic simulation of a Milky Way-like galaxy. The simulated satellites span nearly 4 orders of magnitude in luminosity but…
We present a homogeneous kinematic analysis of red giant branch stars within 18 of the 28 Andromeda dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies, obtained using the Keck I LRIS and Keck II DEIMOS spectrographs. Based on their g-i colors (taken with the…
Using the caustic method, we identify the member stars of five dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies of the Milky Way, the smallest dark matter (DM) dominated systems in the Universe. After our interloper rejection, we compute line-of-sight…
Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are the most common type of galaxies, and are the most dark matter dominated objects in the Universe. Therefore, they are ideal laboratories to test any dark matter model. The Bose-Einstein condensate/scalar field…
We investigate the nature of Ultra Faint dwarf spheroidal galaxies (UF dSphs) in a general cosmological context, simultaneously accounting for various "classical" dSphs and Milky Way (MW) properties, including their Metallicity Distribution…
Using collisionless N-body simulations of dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way (MW) we construct realistic models of dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies of the Local Group. The dwarfs are initially composed of stellar disks embedded in dark…