Invited comunication
J. Brinchmann
Abstract
Ultra-faint dwarfs are the lowest mass and most dark-matter dominated systems known. The shallow potential wells make them susceptible to feedback from star formation and their low baryonic content allows us to use their stars as test-particles in the dark matter potential. The main challenge is that most stars in such dwarfs are typically very faint. Here I will give an overview of the MUSE-Faint survey, a MUSE GTO survey of 10 ultra-faint dwarfs. After introducing the survey, I will outline how the high density of stellar spectra obtainable with MUSE can be used to constrain the dark matter content and density profiles of the galaxies, while the repeated observations can be used to place constraints on the binary star content in these reionization relics. I will also discuss briefly the stellar content and the luminosity-metallicity relation at the edge of galaxy formation.
Joint Astronomy Colloquium
ESO Garching, Germany
2025 September
