The SAGA Survey looks for small galaxies that are orbiting around larger galaxies like our own Milky Way.
Team Members
Who's behind the SAGA Survey?
The SAGA Survey is led by Marla Geha (Yale), Yao-Yuan Mao (Utah), and Risa Wechsler (Stanford).
We are a small team of about 10 members!
Data Access
Explore SAGA data on your own!
SAGA DR3 is now available for download! Click "Get Data" to access the SAGA data sets, including SAGA hosts, satellites, and background galaxy redshifts.
Acknowledgements
We got so much help.
The SAGA Survey was supported in part by NSF AST and the Heising–Simons Foundation,
and is made possible by multiple public astronomical data sets.
We use SAGA background galaxies to study the redshift-dependent relation between galaxy stellar mass and star formation rate (the Star-Forming Sequence, or SFS),
and identified a significant low-redshift evolution of the low-mass SFS.
We use SAGA background galaxy spectra to construct a sample of 11,925 low-mass galaxies with
redshifts from 0.01 to 0.21,
and measure a auroral line metallicity for 120 galaxies. We infer a mass-loading factor of
unity.
We use SAGA data to train a CNN to identify low-z galaxies with imaging data,
and obtain the spatial distributions of xSAGA satellites around host galaxies.
The normalized satellite radial distribution does not depend strongly on host properties.
SAGA Stage II identifies 127 satellites around 36 Milky Way analogs with an improved target
selection strategy.
The satellite quenched fraction among SAGA systems is lower than that in the Local Group.
The first results from SAGA Survey indicate that the Milky Way has a different satellite
population than typical in our sample, potentially changing the physical interpretation of
measurements based only on the Milky Way's satellite galaxies.