Milky Way satellite census. I. DES & PS1

Together, DES and PS1 provide multi-band photometry in optical/near-infrared wavelengths over ~80% of the sky. Our search for satellite galaxies targets ~25000deg^2^ of the high-Galactic-latitude sky reaching a 10{sigma} point-source depth of >~22.5mag in the g and r bands.

While satellite galaxy searches have been performed independently on DES and PS1 before, this is the first time that a self-consistent search is performed across both data sets. We do not detect any new high-significance satellite galaxy candidates, recovering the majority of satellites previously detected in surveys of comparable depth. We characterize the sensitivity of our search using a large set of simulated satellites injected into the survey data.