Academia Sinica Logo

Dwarf galaxies are little fuzzy galaxies that contain much fewer stars than Milky Way-mass galaxies. The observation of these little galaxies can provide constraints on the physical properties of dark matter, and enhance our understanding of the galaxy formation and quenching mechanism. Finding these dwarf galaxies is, however, not an easy task as they are faint and dim from our perspective. I will describe our recent efforts on the search for nearby dwarf galaxies. I will start with the Satellites Around Galactic Analogs (SAGA) Survey, a spectroscopic survey that identifies satellite galaxies around more than 100 Milky Way-like analogs at 25-40 Mpc, putting our Milky Way in a cosmological context. I will highlight some new SAGA results and then discuss how SAGA data can be applied to other dwarf galaxy searches, which include an ongoing secondary target program with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and a plan for the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Both programs will make a much larger population of dwarf galaxies available for the study of dark matter in coming years. Finally, I will turn to our searches for much closer and much fainter dwarf galaxies with resolved stars in the Milky Way’s backyard (within 1 Mpc), and discuss how these ultra-faint dwarf galaxies push our understanding of the galaxy-halo connection to a much lower mass regime.