A visual search has been made of four fields using United Kingdom 1.2m Schmidt Objective Prism plates with a reciprocal dispersion of 1 180 A/mm at HP. Such plate material is ideally suited to searches for emission-line galaxies. We present a catalogue of 53 emission-line objects, which comprises 45 galaxies, where individual HI1 regions are resolved in 16 bright galaxies; 8 are emission li...

We present a color-magnitude diagram (CMD) for a field in the giant tidal stream of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). These observations, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the Hubble Space Telescope, are 50% complete at V ≈ 30, reaching 1 mag below the oldest main-sequence turnoff. Striking similarities between the stream and a previous spheroid CMD imply they have very similar age and me...

There are two fundamentally different physical origins of faint satellite galaxies: cosmological sub-structures that contain shining baryons and the fragmentation of gas-rich tidal arms thrown out from interacting galaxies during hierarchical structure formation. The latter tidal-dwarf galaxies (TDG) may form populations with correlated orbital angular momenta about their host galaxies. The exi...

The spatial distributions of the most recently discovered ultra faint dwarf satellites around the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are compared to the previously reported discs-of-satellites (DoS) of their host galaxies. In our investigation we pay special attention to the selection bias introduced due to the limited sky coverage of SDSS. We find that the new Milky Way satellite galaxies foll...

Using Peebles’ least action principle, we determine trajectories for the galaxies in the Local Group and the more massive galaxies in the Local Neighbourhood. We deduce the resulting angular momentum for the whole of the Local Group and study the tidal force acting on the Local Group and its galaxies. Although Andromeda and the Milky Way dominate the tidal force acting on each other during the ...

The highly anisotropic distribution and apparent alignment of the Galactic satellites in polar great planes begs the question how common such distributions are. The satellite system of M31 is the only nearby system for which we currently have sufficiently accurate distances to study the three-dimensional satellite distribution. We present the spatial distribution of the 15 presently known M31 c...

We use an N–body/hydrodynamic simulation to forecast the future encounter between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies, given current observational constraints on their relative distance, relative velocity, and masses. Allowing for a comparable amount of diffuse mass to fill the volume of the Local Group, we find that the two galaxies are likely to collide in a few billion years within the ...

The relics of disrupted satellite galaxies have been found around the Milky Way and Andromeda, but direct evidence of a satellite galaxy in the early stages of disruption has remained elusive. We have discovered a dwarf satellite galaxy in the process of being torn apart by gravitational tidal forces as it merges with a larger galaxy's dark matter halo. Our results illustrate the morphological ...

The Milky Way and Andromeda must have formed through an initial epoch of substructure merging. As a result of fundamental physical conservation laws tidal-dwarf galaxies (TDGs) have likely been produced. Here we show that such TDGs appear, after a Hubble-time of dynamical evolution in the host dark-matter halo, as objects that resemble known dSph satellite galaxies. We discuss the possibility t...