Marcel S. Pawlowski - Astronomer & Black and White Photographer
  • Home
  • About
  • Research
    • Publications
    • Presentations
    • Press
    • Movies
  • Photography
  • News
  • Contact

New Paper: The new Milky Way satellites: alignment with the VPOS and predictions for proper motions and velocity dispersions

Posted On May 29, 2015 By Marcel In News /  

Over the last few month, about a dozen new satellite galaxy candidates around the Milky Way have been discovered. Each new satellite acts as an important test of the Vast Polar Structure (VPOS), the plane of satellites rotating around our Galaxy. Today we put a preprint on the arXiv in which we show that the new objects align well with the VPOS, confirming my earlier work.

We also find that, even though the footprint of the Dark Energy Survey – the observational campaign which uncovered the majority of the new satellites – lies close to the VPOS, the alignment of the DES satellites with the VPOS is stronger than expected due to the footprint shape. We also predict the proper motions of the new satellites, assuming that they, like observed for the classical ones, preferentially orbit within the VPOS.

In addition we provide predictions for the velocity dispersions of the new objects under the assumption that they are either (1) dark-matter-free star clusters obeying Newtonian Dynamics, (2) dark-matter dominated dwarf galaxies following empirical scaling relations, or (3) that their dynamics follows MOND. These predictions are the main reason why we decided to publish the preprint before acceptance by a journal: we want to avoid that the measurements of the velocity dispersions become available before our predictions (which would make them look like post-dictions).

New Paper: The alignment of SDSS satellites with the VPOS: effects of the survey footprint shape
CWRU's magazine "THINK" writes about my research

Archives

  • July 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • May 2021
  • December 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • January 2020
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • March 2019
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • June 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • November 2015
  • May 2015
  • December 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • February 2014
  • November 2013
  • July 2013
  • March 2013
  • January 2013
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • November 2010
  • August 2010

Meta

  • Log in
All rights reserved.
  • Impressum