Astrostatistics Meeting

The SAGA Survey: searching for Satellites Around Galactic Analogs

​The SAGA Survey is a spectroscopic survey that searches for dwarf satellite galaxies around nearby Milky Way-like systems (learn more at http://sagasurvey.org). So far, the Survey has complete spectroscopic coverage within 300 kpc of 8 systems, and has discovered 16 new satellite galaxies out of about 15,000 galaxies which we observed to obtain spectra. At this point, we need to further optimize our survey strategy for the upcoming observations using the data we have collected. In particular, given the low probability of finding a satellite, we need to develop a program to reduce the number of targets we observe, without significantly sacrificing our completeness. In this talk, I will introduce the Survey, explain the challenge we encounter, and discuss with the audience about our new survey strategy.