Related papers: Triangulum II: a very metal-poor and dynamically h…

The second data release from the Gaia mission (DR2) provides a comprehensive and unprecedented picture of the motions of astronomical sources in the plane of the sky, extending from the solar neighborhood to the outer reaches of the Milky…

This article reports a measurement of the proper motion of Leo II, a dwarf galaxy that is a likely satellite of the Milky Way, based on imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope and Wide Field Camera 3. The measurement uses compact background…

There has been a discussion for many years on whether the disc in the Milky Way extends down to low metallicity. We aim to address the question by employing a large sample of giant stars with radial velocities and homogeneous metallicities…

The Milky Way is a unique laboratory, where stellar properties can be measured and analyzed in detail. In particular, stars in the older populations encode information on the mechanisms that led to the formation of our Galaxy. In this…

We obtained deep Gemini GMOS-S $g,r$ photometry of the ultra-faint dwarf galaxy candidate Cetus II with the aim of providing stronger constraints on its size, luminosity and stellar population. Cetus II is an important object in the…

We present deep wide-field photometry of three recently discovered faint Milky Way satellites: Leo V, Pisces II, and Canes Venatici II. Our main goals are to study the structure and star formation history of these dwarfs; we also search for…

Stellar multiplicity lies at the heart of many problems in modern astrophysics, including the physics of star formation, the observational properties of unresolved stellar populations, and the rates of interacting binaries such as…

We have obtained spectra for 50 candidate red giants in Andromeda II (a dwarf spheroidal companion of M31) using LRIS on the Keck II telescope. After eliminating background galaxies and Galactic foreground stars, we are left with a sample…

We use deep narrowband Ca H&K ($F395N$) imaging taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to construct the metallicity distribution function (MDF) of Local Group (LG) ultra-faint dwarf (UFD) galaxy Eridanus II (Eri II). When combined with…

We present a new, probabilistic method for determining the systemic proper motions of Milky Way (MW) ultra-faint satellites in the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We utilize the superb photometry from the first public data release (DR1) of DES to…

We have created a framework to facilitate the construction of specialized target lists for radial velocity surveys that are biased toward stars that (1) possess planets and (2) are easiest to observe with current detection techniques. We…

Twenty years ago, the mismatch between the observed number of Milky Way satellite galaxies and the predicted number of cold dark matter (CDM) subhalos was dubbed the ``missing satellites problem". Although mostly framed since in terms of…

Using effective temperature and metallicity derived from SDSS spectra for ~60,000 F and G type main sequence stars (0.2<g-r<0.6), we develop polynomial models for estimating these parameters from the SDSS u-g and g-r colors. We apply this…

The lowest luminosity (L < 10^5 L_sun) Milky Way satellite galaxies represent the extreme lower limit of the galaxy luminosity function. These ultra-faint dwarfs are the oldest, most dark matter-dominated, most metal-poor, and least…

We present deep $g,i$-band DECam stellar photometry of the Hercules Milky Way satellite galaxy, and its surrounding field, out to a radial distance of 5.4 times the tidal radius. We have identified nine extended stellar substructures…

We investigate the possibility that Hercules, a recently discovered Milky Way (MW) satellite, is a stellar stream in the process of formation. This hypothesis is motivated by Hercules' highly elongated shape as well as the measurement of a…

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…

We use VLT/FLAMES intermediate resolution (R~6500) spectra of individual red giant branch stars in the near-infrared CaII triplet (CaT) region to investigate the wide-area metallicity properties and internal kinematics of the Sextans dwarf…

We present high-resolution Magellan/MIKE spectroscopy of the brightest star in the ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Leo IV. We measure an iron abundance of [Fe/H] = -3.2, adding to the rapidly growing sample of extremely metal-poor stars being…

We present the first determination of the radial velocities and metallicities of 78 red giant stars in the isolated dwarf irregular galaxy WLM. Observations of the calcium II triplet in these stars were made with FORS2 at the VLT-UT2 in two…