Revealing the Milky Way’s Hidden Satellites: A KiDS Survey Exploration.

In the past two decades, the exploration of Milky Way (MW) satellites has intensified due to the availability of wide-field deep panchromatic photometric surveys carried out with the new generation of telescopes. The application of high-performance overdensity detection techniques on extensive datasets has significantly increased our knowledge of stellar systems residing in the MW halo. These surveys have unlocked the exploration of the low-luminosity faint end of the galaxy luminosity function, which was previously inaccessible, encompassing dwarf galaxies and ultra-faint dwarf (UFD) galaxies. UFDs are not only renowned as the most dark-matter-dominated objects in the Universe but also as the oldest and least chemically evolved galaxies, making them invaluable probes for unraveling the MW’s mass assembly history. To further expand the search for unidentified stellar systems, our study leverages the untapped potential of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS), which has not yet been utilized in the quest for low-surface brightness satellites of the MW. This presentation showcases the outcomes of an extensive investigation encompassing the entire KiDS star catalog.