And here comes another new paper already. This one was processed extremely quickly, even for a letter: I submitted it on the day before I left for my Europe trip, got the referee report less than two weeks later while at the MODEST14 conference, adjusted and re-submitted the paper two days later. It was accepted an hour after re-submission, I got the proofs while in Strasbourg, corrected them and a day after my visit to Vienna the Letter was already published, exactly 4 weeks after the initial submission. I didn’t even find the time to out it on the arXiv before that, so it went there this week.
So, what is the paper about? The presence of satellite galaxy planes around both the Milky Way and Andromeda makes one wonder whether the fact that these two are part of the Local Group increases the chances to find co-orbiting planes of satellite galaxies like the VPOS. This we tested using the cosmological ELVIS simulations, which contain both isolated hosts and hosts in Local-Group-like pairs. We find no significant difference in the occurrence of satellite planes around both types of hosts, in fact such planes are extremely unlikely for both if the simulated dark matter sub-halos are identified with satellite galaxies.
Co-orbiting Planes of Sub-halos are Similarly Unlikely around Paired and Isolated Hosts; Marcel S. Pawlowski & Stacy S. McGaugh; 2014, ApJL, 789, 24.