Day 848

Tuesday.


1503.02074
A spectroscopic survey of the fields of 28 strong gravitational lenses: the redshift catalog
Momcheva, Williams, Cool, Keeton, Zabludoff

Present the spec-z catalog from a wide-field survey of the fields of 28 galaxy-mass SL.  Discuss the acquisition and reduction of the survey data, collected over 40 nights of 6.5m MMT and Magellan time, employing 4 different multi-object spectrographs.  Determine that no biases are introduced by combining datasets obtained with different instrument/spectrograph combinations.  Special care is taken to determine z uncertainties using repeat observations.  The redshift catalog consists of 9768 new and unique galaxy z.  82.4% of the catalog z are between z=0.1 and 0.7, and the catalog median z is 0.36.  The data from this survey will be used to study the lens environments and LoS structures to gain a better understanding of the effects of LSS on lens statistics and lens-derived parameters.


1503.02315
Measurements of sub-degree B-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background from 100 square degrees of SPTpol data
Keisler, et al

The measured spectra are consistent with the signal expected from gravitational lensing.


1503.02584
Eight new Milky Way companions discovered in first-year dark energy survey data
The DES collaboration

Report the discovery of eight new MW companions in ~1800 sqdeg of optical imaging data collected during the first year of DES.  Each system is identified as a statistically significant over-density of individual stars consistent with the expected isochrone and luminosity function of an old and metal-poor stellar population.  The objects span a wide range of absolute magnitude (M_V from -2.2 mag to -7.4 mag), physical scales (10pc to 170pc), and heliocentric distances (30kpc to 330 kpc).  Based on the low surface brightnesses, large physical sizes, and/or large Galactocentric distances of these objects, several are likely to be new ultra-faint satellite galaxies of the MW and/or Magellanic Clouds.  Introduce a likelihood-based algorithm to search for and characterize stellar over-densities, as well as identify stars with high satellite membership probabilities.  Also present completeness estimates for detecting ultra-faint galaxies of varying luminosities, sizes, and heliocentric distances in the first-year DES data.