We have used the publicly released Dark Energy Survey (DES) data to hunt for new satellites of the Milky Way (MW) in the southern hemisphere. Our search yielded a large number of promising candidates. In this paper, we announce the discovery of nine new unambiguous ultra-faint objects, whose authenticity can be established with the DES data alone. Based on the morphological properties, three of the new satellites are dwarf galaxies, one of which is located at the very outskirts of the MW, at a distance of 380 kpc. The remaining six objects have sizes and luminosities comparable to the Segue 1 satellite and cannot be classified straightforwardly without follow-up spectroscopic observations. The satellites we have discovered cluster around the LMC and the SMC. We show that such spatial distribution is unlikely under the assumption of isotropy, and, therefore, conclude that at least some of the new satellites must have been associated with the Magellanic Clouds in the past.

With the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planetary system back in 1999, a great number of projects started to hunt for other similar systems. Because the incidence rate of such systems was unknown and the length of the shallow transit events is only a few percent of the orbital period, the goal was to monitor continuously as many stars as possible for at least a period of a few months. Small aperture, large field of view automated telescope systems have been installed with a parallel development of new data reduction and analysis methods, leading to better than 1% per data point precision for thousands of stars. With the successful launch of the photometric satellites CoRoT and Kepler, the precision increased further by one-two orders of magnitude. Millions of stars have been analyzed and searched for transits. In the history of variable star astronomy this is the biggest undertaking so far, resulting in photometric time series inventories immensely valuable for the whole field. In this review we briefly discuss the methods of data analysis that were inspired by the main science driver of these surveys and highlight some of the most interesting variable star results that impact the field of variable star astronomy.

We present the analysis of 12227 type-ab RR Lyrae found among the 200 million public lightcurves in the Catalina Surveys Data Release 1 (CSDR1 1 ). These stars span the largest volume of the Milky Way ever surveyed with RR Lyrae, covering ∼ 20,000 square degrees of the sky (0 • < α < 360 • , −22 • < δ < 65 • ) to heliocentric distances of up to 60kpc. Each of the RR Lyrae are observed between 60 and 419 times over a six-year period. Using period finding and Fourier fitting techniques we determine periods and apparent magnitudes for each source. We find that the periods at generally accurate to σ = 0.002% by comparison with 2842 previously known RR Lyrae and 100 RR Lyrae observed in overlapping survey fields, We photometrically calibrate the light curves using 445 Landolt standard stars and show that the resulting magnitudes are accurate to ∼ 0.05 mags using SDSS data for ∼ 1000 blue horizontal branch stars and 7788 of the RR Lyrae. By combining Catalina photometry with SDSS spectroscopy, we analyze the radial velocity and metallicity distributions for > 1500 of the RR Lyrae. Using the accurate distances derived for the RR Lyrae, we show the paths of the Sagittarius tidal streams crossing the sky at heliocentric distances from 20 to 60 kpc.By selecting samples of Galactic halo RR Lyrae, we compare their velocity, metallicity, and distance with predictions from a recent detailed N-body model of the Sagittarius system. We find that there are some significant differences between the distances and structures predicted and our observations.

We announce the discovery of the Crater 2 dwarf galaxy, identified in imaging data of the VST ATLAS survey. Given its half-light radius of ∼1100 pc, Crater 2 is the fourth largest satellite of the Milky Way, surpassed only by the LMC, SMC and the Sgr dwarf. With a total luminosity of M V ≈ −8, this galaxy is also one of the lowest surface brightness dwarfs. Falling under the nominal detection boundary of 30 mag arcsec −2 , it compares in nebulosity to the recently discovered Tuc 2 and Tuc IV and UMa II. Crater 2 is located ∼120 kpc from the Sun and appears to be aligned in 3-D with the enigmatic globular cluster Crater, the pair of ultra-faint dwarfs Leo IV and Leo V and the classical dwarf Leo II. We argue that such arrangement is probably not accidental and, in fact, can be viewed as the evidence for the accretion of the Crater-Leo group.

We present a search for γ-ray emission from the direction of the newly discovered dwarf galaxy Reticulum II. Using Fermi-LAT data, we detect a signal that exceeds expected backgrounds between ∼ 2 − 10 GeV and is consistent with annihilation of dark matter for particle masses less than a few × 10 2 GeV. Modeling the background as a Poisson process based on Fermi-LAT diffuse models, and taking into account trials factors, we detect emission with p-value less than 9.8 × 10 −5 (> 3.7σ). An alternative, model-independent treatment of background reduces the significance, raising the p-value to 9.7 × 10 −3 (2.3σ). Even in this case, however, Reticulum II has the most significant γ-ray signal of any known dwarf galaxy. If Reticulum II has a dark matter halo that is similar to those inferred for other nearby dwarfs, the signal is consistent with the s-wave relic abundance cross section for annihilation.PACS numbers: 95.35.+d, 95.55.Ka, 98.56.Wm Dark matter's non-gravitational interactions have profound implications for particle physics beyond the Standard Model, motivating searches for high-energy photons produced via annihilation. The search for γ-rays in dwarf galaxies [e.g.