How Common are the Magellanic Clouds?

Understand

We introduce a probabilistic approach to the problem of counting dwarf satellites around host galaxies in databases with limited redshift information.

• This technique is used to investigate the occurrence of satellites with luminosities similar to the Magellanic Clouds around hosts with properties similar to the Milky Way in the object catalog of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
• Our analysis uses data from SDSS Data Release 7, selecting candidate Milky-Way-like hosts from the spectroscopic catalog and candidate analogs of the Magellanic Clouds from the photometric catalog.
• Our principal result is the probability for a Milky-Way-like galaxy to host N_{sat} close satellites with luminosities similar to the Magellanic Clouds.