The feeble giant: Discovery of a large and diffuse Milky Way dwarf galaxy in the constellation of Crater
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Publication Date
2016-07-01Journal Title
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
ISSN
0035-8711
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Volume
459
Issue
3
Pages
2370-2378
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
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Torrealba, G., Koposov, S., Belokurov, V., & Irwin, M. (2016). The feeble giant: Discovery of a large and diffuse Milky Way dwarf galaxy in the constellation of Crater. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 459 (3), 2370-2378. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw733
Abstract
© 2016 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.We announce the discovery of the Crater 2 dwarf galaxy, identified in imaging data of the VLT Survey Telescope ATLAS survey. Given its half-light radius of ~1100 pc, Crater 2 is the fourth largest satellite of the Milky Way, surpassed only by the Large Magellanic Cloud, Small Magellanic Cloud and the Sgr dwarf. With a total luminosity of MV ≈ -8, this galaxy is also one of the lowest surface brightness dwarfs. Falling under the nominal detection boundary of 30 mag arcsec-2, it compares in nebulosity to the recently discovered Tuc 2 and Tuc IV and UMa II. Crater 2 is located ~120 kpc from the Sun and appears to be aligned in 3D with the enigmatic globular cluster Crater, the pair of ultrafaint dwarfs Leo IV and Leo V and the classical dwarf Leo II. We argue that such arrangement is probably not accidental and, in fact, can be viewed as the evidence for the accretion of the Crater-Leo group.
Keywords
Galaxy: halo, Galaxies: dwarf
Sponsorship
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY FACILITIES COUNCIL (ST/N004493/1)
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw733
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/295002
Rights
Publisher's own licence