Discovery of an Unusual Dwarf Galaxy in the Outskirts of the Milky Way

Details Discovery of an Unusual Dwarf Galaxy in the Outskirts of the Milky Way Discovery of an Unusual Dwarf Galaxy in the Outskirts of the Milky Way

2007-01-05

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0701154v1

Astrophys.J.656:L13-L16,2007

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Ap J (Letters) in press, the subject of an SDSS press release today

Scientific paper

10.1086/512183

In this Letter, we announce the discovery of a new dwarf galaxy, Leo T, in the Local Group. It was found as a stellar overdensity in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5 (SDSS DR5). The color-magnitude diagram of Leo T shows two well-defined features, which we interpret as a red giant branch and a sequence of young, massive stars. As judged from fits to the color-magnitude diagram, it lies at a distance of about 420 kpc and has an intermediate-age stellar population with a metallicity of [Fe/H]= -1.6, together with a young population of blue stars of age of 200 Myr. There is a compact cloud of neutral hydrogen with mass roughly 10^5 solar masses and radial velocity 35 km/s coincident with the object visible in the HIPASS channel maps. Leo T is the smallest, lowest luminosity galaxy found to date with recent star-formation. It appears to be a transition object similar to, but much lower luminosity than, the Phoenix dwarf.

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