Schedule Feb 17, 2012
Searching for MW Dwarfs in RCS2/CFHTLS Survey Data
Beth Willman (Haverford)

Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) based searches for Milky Way companions are limited to less than 0.1% of the virial volume for the very least luminous objects (such as Segue 1 with L~300 Solar luminosities). This extreme observational bias occurs because the lowest luminosity objects have few, if any, red giant branch stars and thus can only be seen by their main-sequence stars. Deeper, wide-field optical surveys promise to mitigate this selection bias and also to possibly reveal more luminous dwarfs throughout the Local Group. The combination of the RCS2 survey and CFHTLS cover ~1000 square degrees at up to 2 magnitudes deeper than SDSS in g and r. Despite the much smaller footprint, they may be sensitive to dwarfs through a volume roughly half that of the SDSS. We present the status of and dwarf galaxy candidates found by a search for resolved dwarf galaxies in the these data.


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