Bibcode
Cicuéndez, L.; Battaglia, G.; Irwin, Mike; McMonigal, Brendan; Lewis, Geraint; Bate, Nick
Bibliographical reference
Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Outskirts, Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, IAU Symposium, Volume 321, pp. 45-45
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3
2017
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
Faint dwarf galaxies such as those found around the Milky Way (MW)
display the largest known dynamical mass-to-light ratios (up to several
100s M⊙/L⊙). However, tidal interaction
with the MW may impact the dynamical equilibrium in the outer parts of
some of these objects, and partly affect the derived dynamical M/L.
Assessing this is crucial for the study of the dark matter content of
these galaxies. A clear sign of ongoing tidal disturbance would be the
presence of tidal tails. These are expected to be low surface brightness
features, hence difficult to detect from star counts in systems where
contamination is also present, e.g. from foreground MW stars. At present
we have searched for these sorts of tidal features in the Sextans dwarf
spheroidal galaxy (dSph), by adopting the Matched Filter Method (e.g.
Rockosi et al. 2002), a very efficient technique to decontaminate
stellar density maps with a high ratio of contamination versus source
density (dwarf galaxies outer regions or ultra faint dwarf galaxies). We
also calculate structural parameters from the position of stars without
requiring spatial binning (Richardson et al. 2011), through a Bayesian
MCMC (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013).