Title: The Observational Quest to Identify the Low-Mass Edge of Galaxy Formation
Speaker: William Cerny (Yale)
Abstract:
Large-scale cosmic surveys have dramatically improved our ability to discover faint, resolved stellar systems in the local universe, bringing us closer to identifying the low-mass threshold of galaxy formation and opening new avenues for testing particle dark matter models. I will first review the past decade of efforts to identify “ultra-faint” satellites in the Milky Way halo, with particular emphasis on recent discoveries that have pushed the frontier in size and luminosity. I will then describe a major ongoing effort to kinematically and chemically disentangle the nature of the faintest and most compact Milky Way satellite discoveries as dwarf galaxies versus star clusters, highlighting several extreme satellites that might represent the lowest-mass galaxies yet discovered. Finally, I will present exciting new results from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's earliest data and discuss the outlook for a complete Milky Way satellite census with Rubin’s 10-year LSST survey.
