Dwarf Cosmology with the Stromlo Missing Satellites Survey.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Astronomy Volume 2010, Article ID 434390, 9 pages doi:10.1155/2010/434390 Review Article Dwarf Cosmology with the Stromlo Missing Satellites Survey Helmut Jerjen Research School of Astronomy Astrophysics, Mt Stromlo Observatory Australian National University, Cotter Road, Weston ACT 2611, Australia Correspondence should be addressed to Helmut Jerjen, jerjen@.au Received 11 May 2009; Accepted 30 July 2009 Academic Editor: Regina Schulte-Ladbeck Copyright © 2010 Helmut Jerjen. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter model is considered to be a triumph of theoretical astrophysics but observations of the Milky Way and its system of satellite galaxies irresistibly signal that theory is incomplete on galactic and subgalactic scales. The Stromlo Missing Satellites (SMS) Survey is a critical endeavor to investigate at what level predictions of CDM cosmology are consistent with the observed matter distribution in the Milky Way halo. It will be the deepest, most extended search for optically elusive satellite galaxies to date, covering 20 000 square degrees of sky. The international SMS Survey collaboration will exploit 150 TB of CCD images in six filters acquired by the new SkyMapper telescope of the Australian National University over the next five years, expecting on completion photometric limits 0.5–1.0 mag fainter than the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The primary objective of the program is to characterise the baryonic and dark matter components of a complete sample of MW satellites in the Southern