Discovery of two neighboring satellites in the Carina constellation with MagLiteS

Understand

We report the discovery of two ultra-faint satellites in the vicinity of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in data from the Magellanic Satellites Survey (MagLiteS).

• Situated 18$^{\circ}$ ($\sim 20$ kpc) from the LMC and separated from each other by only $18^\prime$, Carina~II and III form an intriguing pair.
• By simultaneously modeling the spatial and the color-magnitude stellar distributions, we find that both Carina~II and Carina~III are likely dwarf galaxies, although this is less clear for Carina~III.
• There are in fact several obvious differences between the two satellites.