EIGHT NEW MILKY WAY COMPANIONS DISCOVERED IN FIRST-YEAR DARK ENERGY SURVEY DATA

Abstract

We report the discovery of eight new Milky Way companions in $\\sim 1800\\;{\\mathrm{deg}}^{2}$ of optical imaging data collected during the first year of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Each system is identified as a statistically significant over-density of individual stars consistent with the expected isochrone and luminosity function of an old and metal-poor stellar population. The objects span a wide range of absolute magnitudes (MV from $-2.2$ to $-7.4\\;\\mathrm{mag}$), physical sizes ($10-170\\;\\mathrm{pc}$), and heliocentric distances ($30-330\\;\\mathrm{kpc}$). Based on the low surface brightnesses, large physical sizes, and/or large Galactocentric distances of these objects, several are likely to be new ultra-faint satellite galaxies of the Milky Way and/or Magellanic Clouds. We introduce a likelihood-based algorithm to search for and characterize stellar over-densities, as well as identify stars with high satellite membership probabilities. As a result, we also present completeness estimates for detecting ultra-faint galaxies of varying luminosities, sizes, and heliocentric distances in the first-year DES data.