The Star Formation History and Extended Structure of the Hercules Milky Way Satellite

Understand

We present imaging of the recently discovered Hercules Milky Way satellite and its surrounding regions to study its structure, star formation history and to thoroughly search for signs of disruption.

• We robustly determine the distance, luminosity, size and morphology of Hercules utilizing a bootstrap approach to characterize our uncertainties.
• We derive a distance to Hercules of $133 \pm 6$ kpc via a comparison to empirical and theoretical isochrones.
• As previous studies have found, Hercules is very elongated, with $\epsilon=0.67\pm0.03$ and a half light radius of $r_{h} \simeq 230$ pc.