Related papers: TESS as a Low Surface Brightness Observatory
We predict that there is a population of low-luminosity dwarf galaxies orbiting within the halo of the Milky Way that have surface brightnesses low enough to have escaped detection in star-count surveys. The overall count of stealth…
Low surface brightness galactic stellar halos provide a challenging but promising path towards unraveling the past assembly histories of individual galaxies. Here, we present detailed comparisons between the stellar halos of Milky Way-mass…
Though free-floating planets (FFPs) may outpopulate their bound counterparts in the terrestrial-mass range, they remain one of the least explored exoplanet demographics. Due to their negligible electromagnetic emission at all wavelengths,…
A period of quenching between the formation of the thick and thin disks of the Milky Way has been recently proposed to explain the observed age-[{\alpha}/Fe] distribution of stars in the solar neighbourhood. However, robust constraints on…
The formation of low surface brightness galaxies is an unavoidable prediction of any hierarchical clustering scenario. In these models, low surface brightness galaxies form at late times from small initial overdensities, and make up most of…
Aims: We present a new method that uses luminosity or stellar mass functions combined with clustering measurements to select samples of galaxies at different redshifts likely to follow a progenitor-to-descendant relationship. As the method…
Using the Early Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) we investigated the clustering properties of Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies in comparison to normal, High Surface Brightness (HSB) galaxies. We selected LSB galaxies…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly…
The stellar haloes of galaxies can currently be studied either through observations of resolved halo stars or through surface photometry. Curiously, the two methods appear to give conflicting results, as a number of surface photometry…
We investigate the effects of numerous dark matter subhalos in a galaxy-sized halo on the events of strong lensing, to assess their presence as expected from the cold dark matter scenario. Lens galaxies are represented by a smooth ellipsoid…
The Universe is almost totally unexplored at low surface brightness levels. In spite of great progress in the construction of large telescopes and improvements in the sensitivity of detectors, the limiting surface brightness of imaging…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will enable observations of galaxies at redshifts z > 10 and hence allow to test our current understanding of structure formation at very early times. Previous work has shown that the very first…
In the standard structure formation scenario based on the cold dark matter paradigm, galactic halos are predicted to contain a large population of dark matter subhalos. While the most massive members of the subhalo population can appear as…
We use a new set of cold dark matter simulations of the local universe to investigate the distribution of fossils of primordial dwarf galaxies within, and around the Milky Way. Throughout, we build upon previous results showing agreement…
The Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) paradigm makes specific predictions for the abundance, structure, substructure and clustering of dark matter halos, the sites of galaxy formation. These predictions can be directly tested, in the low-mass…
Massive low surface brightness galaxies have disk central surface brightnesses at least one magnitude fainter than the night sky, but total magnitudes and masses that show they are among the largest galaxies known. Like all low surface…
Analysing the weak lensing distortions of the images of faint background galaxies provides a means to constrain the average mass distribution of cluster galaxies and potentially to test the extent of their dark matter haloes as a function…
In twenty years, low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies have evolved from being an idiosyncratic notion to being one of the major baryonic repositories in the Universe. The story of their discovery and the characterization of their…
The existence of stellar halos around galaxies is a natural prediction of the hierarchical nature of the LambdaCDM model. Recent observations of Milky Way-like galaxies have revealed a wide range in stellar halo mass, including cases with…
We use weak gravitational lensing to analyse the dark matter halos around satellite galaxies in galaxy groups in the CFHTLenS dataset. This dataset is derived from the CFHTLS-Wide survey, and encompasses 154 sq. deg of high-quality shape…