Related papers: Charting Unexplored Dwarf Galaxy Territory With RR…

The number and distribution of dwarf satellite galaxies remain a critical test of cold dark matter-dominated structure formation on small scales. Until recently, observational information about galaxy formation on these scales has been…

We present results for the QUEST RR Lyrae Survey at low galactic latitude, conducted entirely with observations obtained with the QUEST mosaic camera and the 1.0/1.5m J\"urgen Stock Schmidt telescope at the National Observatory of…

We propose that luminous transients, including novae and supernovae, can be used to detect the faintest galaxies in the universe. Beyond a few Mpc, dwarf galaxies with stellar masses $<10^6 M_{\odot}$ will likely be too faint and/or too low…

RR Lyr stars are ideal massless tracers that can be used to study the total mass and dark matter content of the outer halo of the Milky Way. This is because they are easy to find in the light curve databases of large stellar surveys and…

We present new metallicity measurements for 298 individual red giant branch stars in eight of the least luminous dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) in the Milky Way (MW) system. Our technique is based on medium resolution Keck/DEIMOS…

(Abridged) The Sloan Digital Sky Survey now extends over a large enough region that galaxies in low density environments can be detected. Rojas et al. have developed a technique to extract more than 1000 void galaxies with delta rho/rho <…

Dwarf satellite galaxies are a key probe of dark matter and of galaxy formation on small scales and of the dark matter halo masses of their central galaxies. They have very low surface brightness, which makes it difficult to identify and…

We report results from a systematic wide-area search for faint dwarf galaxies at heliocentric distances from 0.3 to 2 Mpc using the full six years of data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Unlike previous searches over the DES data, this…

We present a kinematical study of the outer halo (r_GC approximately 60 to 160 kpc) of the Milky Way based on spectroscopy of 55 RR Lyrae stars obtained with the ESI instrument on the Keck II telescope. Our spectroscopic targets were…

We use deep multi-epoch near-IR images of the VISTA Variables in the V\'ia L\'actea (VVV) Survey to search for RR Lyrae stars towards the Southern Galactic plane. Here we report the discovery of a group of RR Lyrae stars close together in…

We review evidence that the census of Milky Way satellites similar to those known may be incomplete at low latitude due to obscuration and in the outer halo due to a decreasing sensitivity to dwarf satellites with distance. We evaluate the…

Because of strong and spatially highly variable interstellar extinction and extreme source crowding, the faint (K>15) stellar population in the Milky Way's nuclear cluster is still poorly studied. RR Lyrae stars provide us with a tool to…

Most of known RR Lyraes are type ab RR Lyraes (RRLab), and they are the excellent tool to map the Milky Way and its substructures. We find that 1148 RRLab stars determined by Drake et al.(2013) have been observed by spectroscopic surveys of…

RR Lyrae stars (RRLs) are tracers of the Milky Way's fossil record, holding valuable information on its formation and early evolution. Owing to the high interstellar extinction endemic to the Galactic plane, distant RRLs lying at low…

Among the most stringent constraints on the dark matter annihilation cross section are those derived from observations of dwarf galaxies by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. As current (e.g., Dark Energy Survey, DES) and future (Large…

Although it a very narrow angle survey, the depth of the HDF results in its sampling a significant volume of the halo of our galaxy. Thus it is useful for the purposes of detecting (or placing upper limits on the distribution of)…

We have obtained deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging of four faint and ultra-faint dwarf galaxy candidates in the vicinity of M101 - Dw21, Dw22, Dw23 and Dw35, originally discovered by Bennet et al. (2017). Previous distance estimates…

A search for RR Lyrae stars (RRLS) in 840 sq.deg. of the sky in right ascension 150 - 210 deg and declination -10 - +10 deg yielded 1013 type ab and 359 type c RRLS. This sample is used to study the density profile of the Galactic halo,…

According to the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) hierarchical clustering theory of galaxy and large scale structure formation, there should be numerous low mass dark matter haloes present in the Universe today. If these haloes contain sufficient…

We present an extensive search for RR Lyrae stars in and around the ultra-faint Milky Way companions Segue 2 and Segue 3. The former (M_V = -2.5, Belokurov et al. 2009) appears to be an extremely faint dwarf galaxy companion of the Milky…