The low-surface-brightness Universe: a new frontier in the study of galaxy evolution

Understand

New and forthcoming deep-wide surveys, from instruments like the HSC, LSST and EUCLID, are poised to revolutionize our understanding of galaxy evolution, by revealing aspects of galaxies that are largely invisible in past wide-area datasets.

• These surveys will open up the realm of low-surface-brightness (LSB) and dwarf galaxies -- which dominate the galaxy number density -- for the first time at cosmological distances.
• They will also reveal key, unexplored LSB structures which strongly constrain our structure-formation paradigm, such as merger-induced tidal features and intra-cluster light.
• However, exploitation of these revolutionary new datasets will require us to address several data-analysis challenges.