Related papers: TESS as a Low Surface Brightness Observatory
Our current understanding of the low surface brightness universe is quite incomplete, not only in the optical, but also in other wavelength regimes. As a demonstration of the type of science which is facilitated by a virtual observatory, we…
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…
The next generation of exoplanet space photometry missions proposed by both NASA and ESA promise to discover small transiting planets around the nearest and brightest main-sequence stars. The physical and rotational properties of these…
Stephan's Quintet, a compact group of galaxies, is often used as a laboratory to study a number of phenomena, including physical processes in the interstellar medium, star formation, galaxy evolution, and the formation of fossil groups. As…
We use the Illustris Simulations to gain insight into the build-up of the outer, low-surface brightness regions which surround galaxies. We characterize the stellar haloes by means of the logarithmic slope of the spherically-averaged…
The cold dark matter picture predicts an abundance of substructure within the Galactic halo. However, most substructures host no stars and can only be detected indirectly. Stellar streams present a promising probe of this dark substructure.…
Precise measurements of stellar parameters are required in order to develop our theoretical understanding of stellar structure. These measurements enable errors and uncertainties to be quantified in theoretical models and constrain the…
Tidal stellar shells and streams are two of the most intriguing low-surface-brightness features within galaxies, consisting of stars accreted from satellite galaxies. A crucial ingredient in determining which type of feature will be formed…
While mergers between massive galaxies and their dwarf satellites are well studied, the properties of dwarf - dwarf satellite mergers are not well constrained. Stellar streams trace satellite disruption and, in the dwarf galaxy regime, are…
We report the observations of two self-lensing pulses from KIC 12254688 in Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) light curves. This system, containing a F2V star and white-dwarf companion, was amongst the first self-lensing binary…
The transit method of exoplanet discovery and characterization has enabled numerous breakthroughs in exoplanetary science. These include measurements of planetary radii, mass-radius relationships, stellar obliquities, bulk density…
We describe our recent attempts to model substructure in dark matter halos down to very small masses, using a semi-analytic model of halo formation. The results suggest that numerical simulations of halo formation may still be missing…
We use data from the IAC Stripe82 Legacy Project to study the surface photometry of 22 nearby, face-on to moderately inclined spiral galaxies. The reprocessed and combined Stripe 82 $g'$, $r'$ and $i'$ images allow us to probe the galaxy…
The Herschel Lensing Survey (HLS) takes advantage of gravitational lensing by massive galaxy clusters to sample a population of high-redshift galaxies which are too faint to be detected above the confusion limit of current…
Ultra Diffuse Galaxies (UDGs), a type of large Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies with particularly large effective radii (r_eff > 1.5 kpc), are now routinely studied in the local (z<0.1) universe. While they are found to be abundant in…
The stellar halos of large galaxies represent a vital probe of the processes of galaxy evolution. They are the remnants of the initial bouts of star formation during the collapse of the proto-galactic cloud, coupled with imprint of ancient…
Substructures, expected in cold dark matter haloes, have been proposed to explain the anomalous flux ratios in gravitational lenses. About 25% of lenses in the Cosmic Lens All-Sky Survey (CLASS) appear to have luminous satellites within ~ 5…
Determining the positions of halo centres in large-scale structure surveys is crucial for many cosmological studies. A common assumption is that halo centres correspond to the location of their brightest member galaxies. In this paper, we…
The exact formation scenarios and evolutionary processes that led to the existence of the class of low surface brightness galaxies (LSBs) have not yet been understood completely. Since the environment of LSBs has been studied before only on…
Deep observations of faint surface brightness stellar tidal streams in external galaxies with LSST are addressed in this White Paper contribution. We propose using the Wide--Fast--Deep survey that contains several nearby galaxies (at…