An international team led by researchers from Tohoku University has found an extremely faint dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
The team’s discovery is part of the ongoing Subaru Strategic Survey using Hyper Suprime-Cam.
The satellite, named Virgo I, lies in the direction of the constellation Virgo.
At the absolute magnitude of -0.8 in the optical waveband, it may well be the faintest satellite galaxy yet found.
Its discovery suggests the presence of a large number of yet-undetected dwarf satellites in the halo of the Milky Way and provides important insights into galaxy formation through hierarchical assembly of dark matter.
Currently, some 50 satellite galaxies to the Milky Way have been identified. About 40 of them are faint and diffuse and belong to the category of so-called “dwarf spheroidal galaxies.”
Many recently discovered dwarf galaxies, especially those seen in systematic photometric surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Dark Energy Survey (DES) are very faint with absolute luminosity in the optical waveband below -8 magnitude. These are so-called “ultra-faint dwarf galaxies.”
However, previous searches made use of telescopes with a diameter of 2.5 to 4 meters, so only satellites relatively close to the Sun or those with higher magnitudes were identified. Those that are more distant or faint ones in the halo of the Milky Way are yet to be detected.
The combination of the large aperture of 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope and the large field-of-view Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) instrument is very powerful in this study. It enables an efficient search for very faint dwarf satellites over large areas of the sky.
The first step in searching out a new dwarf galaxy is to identify an over density of stars in the sky, using photometric data.