Discovery of the Distant, Ultra-Faint Milky Way Satellite Aquarius IV with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Early Data Preview 2

arXiv:2608.02601 · astro-ph.GA · Submitted 2026-08-03 · Read on arXiv

William Cerny, Aashay Pai, Alex Drlica-Wagner, Andrew B. Pace, Peter S. Ferguson, Marla Geha, Chin Yi Tan, Sasha Campana, Jeffrey L. Carlin, Denija Crnojević, Alexander P. Ji, Guilherme Limberg, Pol Massana, Sidney Mau, Gustavo E. Medina, Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil, Joanna D. Sakowska, Nora Shipp, Guy S. Stringfellow

astro-ph.GA

Submitted: 2026-08-03

Comments: 4 pages, 1 figure; submitted to Research Notes of the AAS. Supplemental figures (skymap, size-luminosity plane, DECam cutout) available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21754874

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Milky Way — 6× in this paper
• Legacy Survey of Space and Time — 2× in this paper

Sources

• Using LSDB to enable large-scale catalog distribution, cross-matching, and analytics
• A Deep Look at the Ultra-Faint Milky Way Satellite Virgo III with Rubin Observatory Data Preview 2

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