Related papers: New Surface Brightness Fluctuations Spectroscopic …
We evaluate the method of optical and infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuations (SBF) as a distance indicator and its application on 8-m class telescopes, such as the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The novelty of our approach resides in the…
We discuss a method for detecting the emission from high redshift galaxies by cross correlating flux fluctuations from multiple spectral lines. If one can fit and subtract away the continuum emission with a smooth function of frequency, the…
The Hercules ultra-faint dwarf galaxy (UFD) has long been hypothesized to be tidally disrupting, yet no conclusive evidence has been found for tidal disruption owing partly to difficulties in identifying Hercules member stars. In this work,…
Stellar streams are remnants of globular clusters or dwarf galaxies that have been tidally disrupted by the gravitational potential of their host galaxy. Streams originating from dwarfs can be particularly compelling targets for indirect…
We develop a method to estimate photometric metallicities by simultaneously fitting the dereddened colors u-g, g-r, r-i and i-z from the SDSS with those predicted by the metallicity-dependent stellar loci. The method is tested with a…
We have the unique opportunity to observe and model nearby streams around the two large Local Group spirals Milky Way and M31 in great detail. However, the detection of streams around other external galaxies is required to verify the…
We present results from a large spectroscopic survey of M31 red giants using the Keck telescope/DEIMOS. Photometric pre-screening, based on the 100A-wide DDO51 band centered on the Mgb/MgH feature, was used to select spectroscopic targets.…
We report the kinematic discovery of the Pisces Stellar Stream (PSS), at Galactic longitude of roughly l=135 degrees and longitude between -39 < b < -36 deg. We originally identified this halo substructure from velocities of red giant…
We carried out a spectroscopic follow-up program of the four new stellar stream candidates detected by Belokurov & Koposov (2016) in the outskirts of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) using FORS2 (VLT). The medium-resolution spectra were…
We describe an imaging method that makes use of interference filters to provide integrated stellar spectral indices for spiral disks to faint surface brightness limits. We use filters with bandpasses ~60A FWHM, centered on the Mg and Fe…
NICMOS observations of the resolved object fluxes in the Hubble Deep Field North and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field are significantly below the fluxes attributed to a 1.4 - 1.8 microns Near InfraRed Background Excess (NIRBE) from previous low…
Most star formation in the local Universe occurs in spiral galaxies, but their origin remains an unanswered question. Various theories have been proposed to explain the development of spiral arms, each predicting different spatial…
We have embarked on a survey of ROSAT PSPC archival data with the aim of detecting all significant surface brightness enhancements due to sources in the innermost 15 arcmin of the PSPC field of view (0.5-2.0 keV). This project is part of…
We present a Monte-Carlo technique to probe the cosmic Infrared background radiation (CIB) with faint source confusion in deep, wide-field 4 micron images. We report a detection of surface brightness fluctuations using an ensemble of 5000…
We have used the Keck I Telescope to measure K-band surface brightness fluctuations (SBFs) of NGC 4874, the dominant elliptical galaxy in the Coma cluster. We use deep HST WFPC2 optical imaging to account for the contamination due to faint…
We measured infrared surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) distances to an isotropically-distributed sample of 16 distant galaxies with redshifts reaching 10,000 km/s using the near-IR camera and multi-object spectrometer (NICMOS) on the…
The mechanism causing breaks in the radial surface brightness distribution of spiral galaxies is not yet well known. Despite theoretical efforts, there is not a unique explanation for these features and the observational results are not…
Stellar streams provide unique probes of galactic potentials, with the longer streams normally providing the cleaner measurements. In this paper, we show an example of a short tidal stream that is particularly sensitive to the shape of the…
Dark matter sub-halos that pass near or through a thin tidal star stream locally increase its velocity dispersion. Subsequent orbital evolution further increases the velocity dispersion and stream width, lowering the surface density of a…
[annotated] HST WFPC2 images were taken of three LSB dwarf elliptical galaxies in the Virgo cluster. The intent of the observations was to determine the small scale structure in these enigmatic galaxies, and to attempt to learn something…