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Crater II is being pulled apart by Milky Way tides, with a stellar stream extending at least 7 degrees (~95 kpc) from its center and evidence of at least 25% stellar mass loss.

Reviewed by Pith at T0; open to challenge. T0 means a machine referee read the full paper against a public rubric. the ladder, T0–T4 →

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2026-08-02 21:04 UTC pith:PLKQFLDC

load-bearing objection Careful CaHK photometry that confirms and extends the known Crater II tidal tails, but the headline mass-loss number leans on a foreground estimate that is likely too low. the 4 major comments →

arxiv 2602.21283 v2 pith:PLKQFLDC submitted 2026-02-24 astro-ph.GA astro-ph.SR

The DECam MAGIC Survey: Uncovering the Tidal Tails of the Crater II Dwarf Galaxy

Kaia R. Atzberger , Andrew B. Pace , Nitya Kallivayalil , Anirudh Chiti , Denis Erkal , William Cerny , Guilherme Limberg , Vinicius M. Placco
show 22 more authors
Deepthi S. Prabhu Guy S. Stringfellow A. Katherina Vivas Astha Chaturvedi Peter S. Ferguson Alexander H. Riley David J. Sand Jeffrey L. Carlin Yumi Choi Denija Crnojevi\'c Alex Drlica-Wagner Alexander P. Ji Ting S. Li Clara E. Mart\'inez-V\'azquez Gustavo E. Medina Noelia E. D. No\"el Alistair R. Walker Julio A. Carballo-Bello David J. James Bur\c{c}in Mutlu-Pakdil Mahdieh Navabi Joanna D. Sakowska
This is my paper
classification astro-ph.GA astro-ph.SR
keywords Crater IIdwarf galaxieslow surface brightness galaxiesstellar streamstidal disruptionphotometric metallicitynarrow band photometrydark matter distribution
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper aims to show that Crater II, a large but extremely diffuse dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, is actively losing stars through tidal tails that stretch far beyond its main body. Using narrowband photometry centered on the calcium H and K lines, the authors separate genuinely metal-poor Crater II stars from foreground Milky Way stars across 128 square degrees. Combining this metallicity filter with color-magnitude, proper-motion, and parallax cuts yields 162 Crater II candidates, 37 of which lie in tidal tails extending at least 7 degrees (~95 kpc) from the galaxy's center. The paper argues this implies Crater II has already lost roughly a quarter or more of its original stellar mass, and reports the first detection of a central metallicity gradient as well as a stream width about 50% larger than the galaxy's half-light radius. The result matters because Crater II's unusually large size, low density, and low velocity dispersion are hard to explain in standard cold dark matter simulations, and a measured stream width provides a new observable for testing cored versus cuspy dark matter halos.

Core claim

On the paper's own terms, the central discovery is that Crater II is surrounded by a coherent, extremely low-surface-brightness stellar stream detected in photometrically selected red-giant stars. From 128 deg^2 of CaHK imaging, the authors identify 162 Crater II members; 37 lie in the tidal tails, extending at least 7 degrees (~95 kpc) from the center, and the fraction of stars found outside the main body implies at least 25% stellar mass loss. The stream has a fitted width of about 0.8 degrees (roughly 1.6 kpc at the galaxy's distance), about 50% larger than the half-light radius, and the paper reports the first significant central metallicity gradient, -0.34 +/- 0.17 dex per degree. Compa

What carries the argument

The central observational tool is narrowband photometry through a filter centered on the Ca II H and K lines (3933.7 and 3968.5 Angstroms), which produces photometric metallicities that cleanly separate the very metal-poor Crater II population from Milky Way foreground stars. Around this metallicity measurement, the analysis builds a four-stage membership selection: a Gaia-based membership score on parallax and proper motion, isochrone color-magnitude cuts adjusted for the predicted distance gradient along the stream, and a final metallicity cut at [Fe/H] < -1.75. A mixture model that accounts for the non-uniform survey footprint converts the 37 tail candidates into an estimate of stream wid

Load-bearing premise

The tail census rests on the assumption that Milky Way foreground contamination measured in 11 control fields stays constant across the full 128 deg^2 footprint; if the foreground varies across the field, a significant fraction of the 37 tail candidates, and the derived mass-loss fraction, could be foreground artifacts.

What would settle it

Take spectra of the 37 tail candidates: if their radial velocities do not cluster around Crater II's systemic velocity and instead match the Milky Way foreground distribution, the tidal-tail interpretation fails. A complementary check would be to place equally deep control fields symmetrically off the putative stream and apply the identical selection; a comparable number of candidates there would indicate the tails are largely foreground.

Watch this falsifier — get emailed when new claim-graph text bears on it.

If this is right

  • Crater II is actively tidally disrupting today, placing it in the small set of Milky Way dwarf galaxies caught in the act of losing stars; its stellar mass estimate must be revised upward by at least ~25%.
  • The measured stream width (~0.8 degrees, about 1.5 times the half-light radius) becomes a new constraint that future cored versus cuspy dark-matter models must reproduce alongside the low central velocity dispersion.
  • Extremely faint stellar debris at ~36 mag arcsec^-2 can be mapped with CaHK narrowband photometry, implying that similar surveys could uncover tidal tails around other apparently intact dwarf galaxies.
  • The detection of candidates in the most distant pointings implies the stream extends beyond the 128 deg^2 footprint, so wider coverage should reveal tails at stream longitudes beyond |phi_1| > 8 degrees.
  • The newly identified tail candidates provide a concrete target list for spectroscopic follow-up; their radial velocities will directly test the tidal interpretation and help measure the stream's velocity dispersion.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • An extension the paper leaves implicit: applying the same CaHK selection to the four upper control pointings that border the predicted N-body track could reveal whether the far tail continues beyond the current footprint.
  • A testable consequence: if future spectroscopy measures the velocity dispersion of the tail members and finds it roughly double the central ~2.3 km/s value, that would favor a cored dark-matter halo; a similar value would favor a cusp, a distinction the width measurement alone cannot settle.
  • More broadly, the same narrowband calcium technique could be pointed at other large, low-density dwarf galaxies; the ~36 mag arcsec^-2 detection here suggests many 'intact' satellites may hide tidal debris at surface brightnesses that current broadband surveys miss.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit.

Referee Report

4 major / 6 minor

Summary. The paper presents DECam N395 (CaHK) narrowband photometry across 128 deg^2 around the Crater II dwarf spheroidal, combined with DEL VE broadband photometry, Gaia astrometry, and a photometric-metallicity selection. The authors identify 162 Crater II candidates, 37 of which lie in the predicted tidal-tail region, and infer that the tails extend at least 7 deg (~95 kpc) and that the system has lost ≳25% of its initial stellar mass. Additional claims include a central metallicity gradient, a stream width w ≈ 0.8 deg, and a comparison of the observed stream to cored and cuspy N-body models, concluding that the dark-matter profile remains ambiguous.

Significance. If the central claims hold, this is an important observational result: it would place Crater II among the few Milky Way dSphs with directly detected tidal tails, provide a new low-surface-brightness stream (~36 mag arcsec^-2) for tidal-disruption studies, and add a concrete observational constraint on the dark-matter halo profile of a famously unusual dwarf. The paper's strengths are substantial: the photometric metallicity method is cross-validated against two independent spectroscopic samples with reported purity estimates; the analysis uses control fields, a public machine-readable candidate table, and reproducible N-body models; and the distance-gradient selection is independently supported by RR Lyrae distances. However, the headline quantitative claims — 37 tail candidates and ≳25% mass loss — depend sensitively on the foreground-contamination estimate, and the paper itself contains internally contradictory purity estimates that must be reconciled before the mass-loss claim can be accepted.

major comments (4)
  1. [§4.3.1, §4.3.3, §5.1] The foreground-contamination estimate is the load-bearing uncertainty for the headline mass-loss claim. The empirical control-field estimate gives ~2 expected contaminants over the 63 deg^2 Crater II footprint, but the paper's own Besançon model yields ~21 contaminants (§4.3.3). The control fields are not matched in Galactic latitude (far tail b~34-41 deg; near tail b~43-49 deg) and six are ~1 mag shallower because they are undithered. The spectroscopic cross-match in §4.3.2 already implies a tail purity of only 10/12 = 83%, i.e. ~6 non-members among the 37 tail candidates, exactly matching the N_MW = 6 foreground component in the width fit (§5.3). If the true contamination is closer to the Besançon value, the genuine tail count would be roughly 16 rather than 37, and the inferred mass-loss fraction would drop to ~10-15%, below the claimed ≳25%. Please provide a sensitivity analysis that
  2. [§2.3, §4.1, §5.2] The uncorrected CaHK metallicity offset and its metallicity-dependent residual directly affect the membership selection and the new metallicity-gradient claim. Figure 2 reports a mean offset of 0.15 ± 0.03 dex and a residual that correlates linearly with metallicity, yet no correction is applied. The [Fe/H] < -1.75 cut is then tuned to the uncorrected MDF (§4.1). Because the offset varies with [Fe/H], the reported central gradient of -0.34 ± 0.17 dex deg^-1 (§5.2) could be partly induced by a spatially varying mix of metallicities interacting with the calibration residual. Please quantify the systematic uncertainty on the gradient by (a) applying the Figure 2 correction, (b) repeating the regression with the two [Fe/H] < -3.5 stars removed (the paper notes this flattens the gradient by ~0.1 dex), and (c) testing whether the result survives if the selection cut is shifted by the offset.
  3. [§3.2, §5.3, §6.2] The stream-width comparison is partially circular: the stream coordinate system and the distance-gradient function in Eq. (7) are derived from the same cusp-base N-body model that is subsequently compared with the observed stream width in §5.3 and §6.2. The distance gradient is independently supported by RR Lyrae stars, which is good, but the coordinate rotation matrix and the assumed orbit track also come from N-body modeling. Since the observed width is measured relative to that track, a small error in the track can bias w. Please test the robustness of w = 0.80 deg by recomputing the width in a coordinate system defined independently of the N-body model, e.g. using the RR Lyrae distribution or a simple great-circle fit through the spectroscopically confirmed stream members. At minimum, state explicitly which parts of the width measurement depend on the model track and which are purely
  4. [§5.1] The mass-loss estimate uses the ratio 37/124 tail-to-center candidates and assumes that the central system's stellar mass is 10^5.55 M_sun (Ji et al. 2021), but it does not account for the different survey depths between the near and far tails or the incomplete coverage of the stream. The paper itself notes the near side is ~0.7 mag deeper than the far side (§6.1), and the abstract claims the tails extend beyond the footprint. A lower limit based on observed candidates is therefore not directly comparable to a 'lost ≳25% of initial stellar mass' without integrating a completeness model. Please present the mass-loss estimate as a function of the assumed foreground contamination and depth corrections, or restrict the claim to 'at least X% of the central stellar mass is currently in the observed tail region.'
minor comments (6)
  1. [Figure 1 caption vs. §4.3.1] The caption says 'The 2 fields outside the outline but directly next to the CraII core were dithered in poor conditions', while §4.3.1 says '1 of the 3 CraII pointings outside of the highest quality data outline' is not dithered. Please reconcile the counts of dithered/undithered pointings and their depths.
  2. [§4.1] The text states 'This results in a sample of 161 candidates' before introducing the distance-gradient selection, then the final sample is 162. Please explicitly state that 161 is the sample without the distance gradient and 162 is the final sample with it, to avoid an apparent inconsistency.
  3. [Eq. (7)] The distance-gradient function is written without units for phi_1. Since phi_1 is in degrees, please state this explicitly and also give the coefficient uncertainties or note that the fit is from the N-body model only.
  4. [§5.3] The phrase 'velocity dispersion ratio to be 2.10 +0.37/-0.31 deg km/s' in §6.2 appears to have a typo: velocity dispersion should have units of km/s, not deg km/s. Please correct and clarify whether this is a ratio or an absolute value.
  5. [§2.1 and Appendix A] The paper alternates between '21 observed DECam pointings' and '25 dithered pointings' with 7 undithered, which is clear after reading carefully, but a summary table of fields (dithered/undithered, depth, control vs. science) would greatly improve reproducibility.
  6. [§6.2] The comparison to Errani et al. (2015) depends on assuming the third pericentric passage matches CraII's orbital history. Please add a sentence quantifying how sensitive the cored/cuspy conclusion is to the choice of pericentric passage, since the paper acknowledges the orbits are not exactly equivalent.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity: the N-body model used to define stream coordinates and the distance-gradient selection is explicitly not fitted to the tidal tails, and the headline measurements (37 tail candidates, ≳25% mass loss, stream width 0.80°) are free observables or simple star-count scalings, not model outputs.

full rationale

The only conceivable loop is that the same cusp-base N-body model (Section 3.1, from Limberg et al. 2025) defines the stream coordinate system and the distance-gradient function DM(φ1) used for CMD selection (Equations 1 and 7), and is later compared with the observed stream width (Section 6.2). This is not a circular reduction. The paper explicitly states: 'We stress that these simulations are not tailored to match the tidal tails but are instead just based on the structural properties of the CraII dwarf and its present day phase-space coordinates' (§3.1). The distance gradient is independently checked against RR Lyrae distances: 'we predict the distance gradient from the model to be −3.56 kpc deg−1 and find that it closely compares to the absolute value of the gradient from Vivas et al. (2025), 3.7 kpc deg−1' (§4.2). The measured stream width is a free parameter in the mixture model (Equation 9) and returns w = 0.80°, which differs from the same N-body model's width of 1.19°, so the comparison is falsifiable rather than forced. The '37 tail candidates' are selected through astrometric, photometric, and metallicity cuts, and the ≳25% mass loss is a lower limit obtained by scaling central star counts to tail star counts (§5.1), not an output of the N-body model. Foreground contamination is assessed with control fields and two external spectroscopic samples, with the Besançon model used only as a cross-check; the factor-of-several uncertainty in the empirical background is a data-quality concern, not a circularity. The self-citation to Limberg et al. (2025) for the rotation matrix and cored/cuspy models is not load-bearing because the models are described in the present paper and the conclusions (including the stated ambiguity between cored and cuspy halos) do not reduce to that citation.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

3 free parameters · 5 axioms · 0 invented entities

The central claims rest on the [Fe/H] cut, the N-body distance gradient, the assumed uniform foreground, and population-ratio assumptions. No new physical entities are introduced.

free parameters (3)
  • [Fe/H] membership threshold = -1.75 dex
    Chosen in §4.1 after testing -1.5, -1.75, and -2.0 against the observed MDF of the same dataset to maximize purity; not independently calibrated.
  • N-body distance-gradient coefficients (DM(phi1) = a*phi1^2 + b*phi1 + c) = a=-2.76e-5, b=-0.07, c=20.36 (Eq. 7)
    Fit to the cusp-base N-body model in §3.1/§4.2 and used to shift the isochrone for tail candidates. Validated with RR Lyrae distances, but the functional form and coefficients come from the model.
  • N-body dark matter halo mass M200 = 10^7 Msun
    Chosen in §3.1 so that the simulated velocity dispersion (3.14 km/s) roughly matches the observed value (2.55 km/s); the same model is later used to predict the stream track and distance gradient.
axioms (5)
  • domain assumption The 12.5 Gyr, [Fe/H]=-2.24 Dartmouth isochrone approximates CraII's RGB, and the age/metallicity spread has minimal impact on CMD selection.
    Invoked in §4.1 to define the color-magnitude cuts; if wrong, the membership sample is biased.
  • ad hoc to paper Milky Way foreground is approximately uniform across the CraII footprint, so control-field contamination scales by area.
    Stated in §4.3.1; the paper's own Besançon comparison (§4.3.3) suggests a much higher and spatially varying background, making this a fragile premise.
  • domain assumption The adopted MW potential (MWPotential2014), LMC Hernquist model, and CraII phase-space coordinates produce a reliable N-body stream track and distance gradient.
    Used in §3.1-3.2 and §4.2; the stream track and distance gradient depend on these choices.
  • domain assumption The ratio of RGB stars to RR Lyrae stars is constant between the center and tidal tails.
    Used in §6.1 to argue the tail detections are signal; if the stellar population varies along the stream, the argument weakens.
  • domain assumption The stream and central remnant contain the same stellar population and are probed to the same luminosity, enabling mass-loss and surface-brightness estimates.
    Used in §5.1 and §6.1; the paper acknowledges the luminosity-probing assumption is invalid due to the distance gradient.

pith-pipeline@v1.3.0-alltime-deepseek · 37682 in / 12522 out tokens · 114239 ms · 2026-08-02T21:04:52.580596+00:00 · methodology

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read the original abstract

Crater II (CraII), a large and low-density dwarf spheroidal galaxy, has unusual observed properties that are difficult to reproduce in cold dark matter simulations. Ongoing tidal disruption may help explain the discrepancies, as evidenced by the recent discovery of tidal tails. Here we present metallicity-sensitive narrowband photometry of the Ca II H and K lines from the Dark Energy Camera, covering $128$ deg$^2$ across the center and identified tidal tails of CraII as part of the Mapping the Ancient Galaxy in CaHK (MAGIC) survey. Our combined photometric metallicity, color-magnitude, proper motion, and parallax selections identify 162 CraII candidates. Of these, 37 candidates are located in the tidal tails which extend at least $7^\circ$ ($\sim 95$ kpc) from the center of CraII, suggesting it has lost $\gtrsim 25$% of its initial stellar mass. We confirm low contamination rates with dedicated control fields and highlight the extremely low surface brightness stellar features that can be uncovered with CaHK data, as faint as $\sim 36$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$. We also make the first detection of a metallicity gradient ($-0.34\pm0.17~{\rm dex}~{\rm deg}^{-1}$) in the center of the galaxy and infer a stream width of $w\sim 0.8^\circ$, roughly 50% larger than the CraII half-light radius. The detection of candidates in the most distant CraII pointings from its center implies that the tidal tails extend beyond our footprint. We compare the CraII stream to $N$-body models with "cored" and "cuspy" dark matter halo progenitors, determining that CraII's density profile is still ambiguous and warrants further modeling.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2602.21283 by A. Katherina Vivas, Alexander H. Riley, Alexander P. Ji, Alex Drlica-Wagner, Alistair R. Walker, Andrew B. Pace, Anirudh Chiti, Astha Chaturvedi, Bur\c{c}in Mutlu-Pakdil, Clara E. Mart\'inez-V\'azquez, David J. James, David J. Sand, Deepthi S. Prabhu, Denija Crnojevi\'c, Denis Erkal, Guilherme Limberg, Gustavo E. Medina, Guy S. Stringfellow, Jeffrey L. Carlin, Joanna D. Sakowska, Julio A. Carballo-Bello, Kaia R. Atzberger, Mahdieh Navabi, Nitya Kallivayalil, Noelia E. D. No\"el, Peter S. Ferguson, Ting S. Li, Vinicius M. Placco, William Cerny, Yumi Choi.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Twenty-one observed DECam pointings (gray) and eleven candidate control fields (blue-gray) relative to the center of CraII. The direction of the stream track as predicted by the N-body model in blue (see Section 3.1) is shown as a solid black line. Pointings within the dark teal outlines were observed under the best weather conditions and dithered, providing the highest quality data of the sample. The 2 fi… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Comparison of 114 CraII (orange) stellar metal￾licities with CaHK photometry and high-resolution calcium triplet spectroscopic metallicities from the AAOmega spec￾trograph on the 3.9 m Anglo-Australian Telescope (Ji et al. 2021). We also show 1969 previously measured metallicity validation results from Barbosa et al. (2025) for spectroscopic measurements (de los Reyes et al. 2022; Tolstoy et al. 2023) of s… view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Color-magnitude and color-color diagrams of MAGIC data after each selection. All quality cut MAGIC data surrounding CraII (as seen in [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p008_3.png] view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Candidates in the central CraII pointing before and after applying proper motion and parallax criteria from the membership score (Tolstoy et al. 2023). The membership score limit, MemGaia = 14.2, is determined by 3σ for a 1D normal distribution and is drawn as a dashed black line. The remaining data after quality cuts is sequentially selected by color-magnitude and membership score selections, shown in pur… view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Comparison of MAGIC CaHK photometric metallicity distribution for different selection criteria across all candidates and in the isolated candidate control fields. Left: Metallicity distribution function of color-magnitude and membership score selected CraII candidates overall/in the background before (light purple/gray) and after (dark purple/gray) metallicity cuts of [Fe/H] < −2 (dashed line), [Fe/H] < −1… view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Predicted distance modulus (distance; right axis) as a function of stream longitude from the N-body simulation (blue) over the measured area. CraII distance modulus from the quadratic fit of N-body data across ϕ1 is shown in gray for all of the MAGIC quality cut data. Candidates from two RRL surveys (Coppi et al. 2024; Vivas et al. 2025) are also shown. tion errors of CraII candidates. Limberg et al. (2025… view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Color-magnitude diagrams of DECam g0 and r0 magnitudes against g0 − r0 and r0 − i0 colors. All quality cut MAGIC data surrounding CraII (as seen in [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p011_7.png] view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Spatial distribution of selected CraII candidates. All quality cut MAGIC data surrounding CraII (as seen in [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_8.png] view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Color-magnitude diagram with DECam g0, r0, i0 photometry comparing the number of CraII candidates to MW foreground. We apply the same BMW limits of 16 ≤ r0 ≤ 22, −0.25 ≤ r0 − i0 ≤ 0.75, and 0.40 ≤ g0 − r0 ≤ 1.10 to the CraII data. In each subfigure, all the quality cut MAGIC data surrounding CraII (as seen in [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_9.png] view at source ↗
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: Metallicity gradient (black line) of CraII candi￾dates (purple) along ϕ1 in the center pointing of the galaxy, −0.34 ± 0.17 dex deg−1 (−0.17 ± 0.08 dex kpc−1 ). A shaded region indicates the 1σ error on the gradient. There are two outliers with [Fe/H] < −3.5. Removing them would flatten the gradient by ∼ 0.1 dex, but it would still be significant at the 2σ level. However, we believe they should not be ex￾… view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: Width measurement of the CraII stream from fitting a mixture model that accounts for our non-uniform footprint. Left: Histogram of CraII candidates (indigo bins), compared to the CraII model (black line) and the MW foreground model (red). Both the CraII and MW models are convolved with the selection function (S(ϕ2)) and the shaded bands denote 1σ errors. Center: Distribution of CraII candidates relative t… view at source ↗
Figure 12
Figure 12. Figure 12: Spatial distribution of selected CraII candidates (dark purple outline) compared to the N-body simulation (blue) used to choose DECam pointings. Candidates are color-coded by CaHK metallicity. We find that including these 4 upper pointings do not change our results in Section 5.3. 6.1. Tidal Disruption We uncover a clear stream across a 16 × 8 deg2 area. Of our sample of CraII candidates, nearly 25% of st… view at source ↗
Figure 13
Figure 13. Figure 13: Width and velocity dispersion of the cored (solid circles) and cuspy (open right-facing triangles) dSph models from Errani et al. (2015) compared to the CraII width from this paper (dark purple line) and N-body modeled (blue) widths. The error in CraII width is shown as a highlighted region around the line at the measured value. The width is normalized by the half-light radius and the velocity disper￾sion… view at source ↗
Figure 14
Figure 14. Figure 14: Error fits for magnitude, proper motion right ascension (µα⋆ ), proper motion declination (µδ), and parallax (ϖ) as a function of g0 magnitude. These functions for the CraII MAGIC data are applied to the BMW simulations [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p027_14.png] view at source ↗

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Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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  3. The DECam MAGIC Survey $-$ Mapping the Ancient Galaxy in CaHK: Overview and Summary of Early Science

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    The MAGIC survey provides photometric metallicities for RGB stars over ~3000 deg² using CaHK narrow-band imaging plus DELVE g,r,i data, recovering 13/14 known ultra-faint dwarfs and confirming a distant Reticulum II member.

  4. The DECam MAGIC Survey: Investigating the Jet Stellar Stream with Photometric Metallicities

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