Hidden depths in the local Universe: The Stellar Stream Legacy Survey

Creators: Martínez-Delgado, David; Cooper, Andrew P.; Román, Javier; Pillepich, Annalisa; Erkal, Denis; Pearson, Sarah; Moustakas, John; Laporte, Chervin F. P.; Laine, Seppo; Akhlaghi, Mohammad; Lang, Dustin; Makarov, Dmitry; Borlaff, Alejandro S.; Donatiello, Giuseppe; Pearson, William J.; Miró-Carretero, Juan; Cuillandre, Jean-Charles; Domínguez, Helena; Roca-Fàbrega, Santi; Frenk, Carlos S.; Schmidt, Judy; Gómez-Flechoso, María A.; Guzman, Rafael; Libeskind, Noam I.; Dey, Arjun; Weaver, Benjamin A.; Schlegel, David; Myers, Adam D.; Valdes, Frank G.

Abstract

Context. Mergers and tidal interactions between massive galaxies and their dwarf satellites are a fundamental prediction of the Lambda-cold dark matter cosmology. These events are thought to provide important observational diagnostics of non-linear structure formation. Stellar streams in the Milky Way and Andromeda are spectacular evidence for ongoing satellite disruption. However, constructing a statistically meaningful sample of tidal streams beyond the Local Group has proven a daunting observational challenge, and the full potential for deepening our understanding of galaxy assembly using stellar streams has yet to be realised. Aims. Here we introduce the Stellar Stream Legacy Survey, a systematic imaging survey of tidal features associated with dwarf galaxy accretion around a sample of ∼3100 nearby galaxies within z ∼ 0.02, including about 940 Milky Way analogues. Methods. Our survey exploits public deep imaging data from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, which reach surface brightness as faint as ∼29 mag arcsec⁻² in the r band. As a proof of concept of our survey, we report the detection and broad-band photometry of 24 new stellar streams in the local Universe. Results. We discuss how these observations can yield new constraints on galaxy formation theory through comparison to mock observations from cosmological galaxy simulations. These tests will probe the present-day mass assembly rate of galaxies, the stellar populations and orbits of satellites, the growth of stellar halos, and the resilience of stellar disks to satellite bombardment.

Additional Information

© The Authors 2023. Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This article is published in open access under the Subscribe to Open model. Subscribe to A&A to support open access publication. We thank Eva K. Grebel, Facundo A. Gómez, Aaron Romanowski and Emilio Galvez for useful comments. We thank Mireia Montes for her insight and expertise regarding the capabilities of Vera C. Rubin Telescope Survey. DMD acknowledges financial support from the Talentia Senior Program (through the incentive ASE-136) from Secretaría General de Universidades, Investigación y Tecnología, de la Junta de Andalucía. DMD acknowledges funding from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish MCIU through the "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" award to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709) and AEI project (PDI2020-114581GB-C21/AEI/10.13039/501100011033). APC is supported by the Taiwan Ministry of Education (MoE) Yushan Fellowship and Taiwan National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) grant 109-2112-M-007-011-MY3. This work made use of HPC facilities at the National Tsing Hua University Center for Informatics and Computation in Astronomy (CICA), supported by grants from MoE and NSTC. This work has also been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant AYA2014-56795-P. This work was supported in part by World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI Initiative), MEXT, Japan. We acknowledge the usage of the HyperLeda database (http://leda.univ-lyon1.fr). AP and DMD acknowledge support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 138713538 – SFB 881 ("The Milky Way System", subprojects A1 and A2). JR acknowledges financial support from the grants AYA2015-65973-C3-1-R and RTI2018-096228- BC31 (MINECO/FEDER, UE) and support from the State Research Agency (AEI-MCINN) of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under the grant "The structure and evolution of galaxies and their central regions" with reference PID2019-105602GB-I00/10.13039/501100011033. MA acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competi-tiveness (MINECO) under grant number AYA2016-76219-P and EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 721463 to the SUNDIAL ITN. W.J.P. has been supported by the Polish National Science Center project UMO-2020/37/B/ST9/00466. CSF acknowledges support by the European Research Council (ERC) through Advanced Investigator grant DMIDAS (GA 786910) and by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) consolidated grant ST/P000541/1. This work used the DiRAC@Durham facility managed by the Institute for Computational Cosmology on behalf of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility (https://www.dirac.ac.uk). The equipment was funded by BEIS capital funding via STFC capital grants ST/K00042X/1, ST/P002293/1, ST/R002371/1 and ST/S002502/1, Durham University and STFC operations grant ST/R000832/1. DiRAC is part of the National e-Infrastructure. A.B. was supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the NASA Ames Research Center, administered by Universities Space Research Association under contract with NASA. This project uses data from observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. We acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministry for Science, Innovation and Universities and FEDER funds through grant AYA2016-81065-C2-2. We also used data obtained with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was constructed by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovacão, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones Enérgeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ciències de l'Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de Física d'Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the University of Nottingham, the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, and Texas A&M University. Support for this work was provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant #HST-HF2-51466.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. This work was partly done using GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro, ascl.net/1801.009) version 0.14. Work on Gnuastro has been funded by the Japanese MEXT scholarship and its Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (21244012, 24253003), the European Research Council (ERC) advanced grant 339659-MUSICOS, and from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant number AYA2016-76219-P.

Attached Files

Published - aa45011-22.pdf

Files

aa45011-22.pdf

Files (52.7 MB)

Name	Size	Download all
aa45011-22.pdf md5:b5866923db463a55a761580633038ac0	52.7 MB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes