Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Belokurov, V
• Irwin, M. J
• Koposov, S. E
• Evans, N. W
• Gonzalez-Solares, E
• Metcalfe, N
• Shanks, T

Titel

ATLAS lifts the Cup: discovery of a new Milky Way satellite in Crater

Ist Teil von

• Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2014-07, Vol.441 (3), p.2124-2133

Ort / Verlag

London: Oxford University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Quelle

Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• We announce the discovery of a new Galactic companion found in data from the ESO VST ATLAS survey, and followed up with deep imaging on the 4-m William Herschel Telescope. The satellite is located in the constellation of Crater (the Cup) at a distance of ∼170 kpc. Its half-light radius is r h = 30 pc and its luminosity is M V  = −5.5. The bulk of its stellar population is old and metal poor. We would probably have classified the newly discovered satellite as an extended globular cluster were it not for the presence of a handful of blue loop stars and a sparsely populated red clump. The existence of the core helium burning population implies that star formation occurred in Crater perhaps as recently as 400 Myr ago. No globular cluster has ever accomplished the feat of prolonging its star formation by several Gyr. Therefore, if our hypothesis that the blue bright stars in Crater are blue loop giants is correct, the new satellite should be classified as a dwarf galaxy with unusual properties. Note that only 10°to the north of Crater, two ultrafaint galaxies Leo IV and Leo V orbit the Galaxy at approximately the same distance. This hints that all three satellites may once have been closely associated before falling together into the Milky Way halo.