Satellites, Streams, and Surveys, Oh My!

Abstract

In the past few decades we have entered a new age of astronomy where large scale astronomical surveys have enabled us to advance and revolutionize our understanding of the Milky Way and its neighborhood. The outskirts of our Galaxy has been found to be teeming with substructure ranging from intact objects such as the classical satellites to the much smaller ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, to disrupted objects like stellar streams. In this thesis I discuss two science projects that I have led characterizing substructure of the Milky Way. The first project studies the core of the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy, where we use RR-lyrae type stars as three-dimensional tracers in order to characterize the shape of this core. Second, I discuss my project with the DECam Local Volume Exploration (DELVE) survey. This survey uses archival DECam data and 126 nights of dedicated observations to create a deep wide-field photometric catalog of the high-Galactic latitude southern sky. In this analysis, I fully characterize the Jet stellar stream for the first time using DELVE and Gaia data. Additionally, I will cover my instrumentation work on TCal which will help to enable and enhance the science return for the next generation of large scale precision photometric surveys.