Tracing satellite planes in the Sculptor group: II. Discovery of five faint dwarf galaxies in the DESI Legacy Survey

Understand

Although substantial progress has been made in reconciling LCDM simulations with the observed abundance and distribution of satellite galaxies, important tensions persist.

• Studying satellite systems around spiral galaxies thus remains key in addressing these tensions.
• In this series of papers we report the first results of an on-going systematic survey of faint dwarf spheroidal galaxies in the vicinity of the bright late-type spiral NGC 253 galaxy, the brightest member of the Sculptor filament located at a distance of 3.7 Mpc.
• We performed a new NGC 253 satellite search by means of visual inspection using co-added image cutouts reprocessed in the DESI Legacy image surveys, reaching a very low surface brightness regime (28.0--29.0 mag arcsec-2).