Related papers: An extended halo around an ancient dwarf galaxy
While the connection between high-redshift star formation and the local universe has recently been used to understand the observed population of faint dwarf galaxies in the Milky Way (MW) halo, we explore how well these nearby objects can…
In this Letter, we report the discovery of a new dwarf satellite to the Milky Way, located at ($\alpha_{2000}, \delta_{2000}$) $=$ (158.72,51.92) in the constellation of Ursa Major. This object was detected as an overdensity of red,…
Understanding galaxy formation involves look-back and fossil-record studies of distant and nearby galaxies, respectively. Debris trails in our Galaxy's spheroidal halo of old stars provide evidence of "bottom-up" formation via tidal…
Standard cosmology predicts that dwarfs were the first galaxies to be formed in the Universe and that many of them merge afterwards to form bigger galaxies such as the Milky Way. This process would have left behind traces such as tidal…
We explore the possibility that extended disks, such as that recently discovered in M31, are the result of a single dwarf (10^9--10^10 Msun) satellite merger. We carry out N-body simulations of dwarf NFW halos with embedded spheriodal…
The dwarf spheroidal galaxy in Ursa Minor is apparently dark-matter dominated, and is of very low surface brightness, with total luminosity only equal to that of a globular cluster. Indeed its dominant stellar population is old and…
Near-field observations may provide tight constraints - i.e. "boundary conditions" - on any model of structure formation in the Universe. Detailed observational data have long been available for the Milky Way (e.g. Freeman $\&$…
The radial number density and flattening of the Milky Way's stellar halo is measured with $\mathrm{5351}$ metal-poor ([Fe/H]$<-1$) K giants from LAMOST DR3, using a nonparametric method which is model independent and largely avoids the…
Accreted stellar populations are comprised of the remnants of destroyed galaxies, and often dominate the `stellar haloes' of galaxies such as the Milky Way (MW). This ensemble of external contributors is a key indicator of the past assembly…
The empirical model of Lu et al. 2014 is updated with recent data and used to study galaxy star formation and assembly histories. At $z > 2$, the predicted galaxy stellar mass functions are steep, and a significant amount of star formation…
If the favored hierarchical cosmological model is correct, then the Milky Way system should have accreted ~100-200 luminous satellite galaxies in the past \~12 Gyr. We model this process using a hybrid semi-analytic plus N-body approach…
The spatial distributions of the most recently discovered ultra faint dwarf satellites around the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are compared to the previously reported discs-of-satellites (DoS) of their host galaxies. In our…
Low-mass dwarf galaxies ($M_{\rm vir} \lesssim 10^9\rm\ M_\odot$) are fundamental cosmological building blocks, yet the physical processes driving their structural diversity remain poorly understood. Recent numerical simulations have…
Deep, wide-area photometric surveys have uncovered a population of compact ($r_{1/2} \approx$ 1-15 pc), extremely-low-mass ($M_* \approx$ 20-4000 $M_{\odot}$) stellar systems in the Milky Way halo that are smaller in size than known…
We use the \texttt{GRUMPY} galaxy formation model based on a suite of zoom-in, high-resolution, dissipationless $\Lambda$ Cold Dark Matter ($\Lambda$CDM) simulations of the Milky Way (MW) sized haloes to examine total matter density within…
We use \texttt{GRUMPY}, a simple regulator-type model for dwarf galaxy formation and evolution, to forward model the dwarf galaxy satellite population of the Milky Way (MW) using the Caterpillar zoom-in simulation suite. We show that…
The dwarf satellite galaxies in the Local Group are generally considered to be hosted in dark matter subhalos that survived the disruptive processes during infall onto their host halos. It has recently been argued that if the majority of…
Extended, old, and round stellar halos appear to be ubiquitous around high-mass dwarf galaxies ($10^{8.5}<M_\star/M_\odot<10^{9.6}$) in the observed universe. However, it is unlikely that these dwarfs have undergone a sufficient number of…
Numerical simulations of Milky-Way size Cold Dark Matter (CDM) halos predict a steeply rising mass function of small dark matter subhalos and a substructure count that greatly outnumbers the observed satellites of the Milky Way. Several…
Globular star clusters are among the first stellar populations to have formed in the Milky Way, and thus only a small sliver of their initial spectrum of stellar types are still burning hydrogen on the main-sequence today. Almost all of the…