Tucana B: A Potentially Isolated and Quenched Ultra-faint Dwarf Galaxy at D ≈ 1.4 Mpc

Abstract

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.We report the discovery of Tucana B, an isolated ultra-faint dwarf galaxy at a distance of D = 1.4 Mpc. Tucana B was found during a search for ultra-faint satellite companions to the known dwarfs in the outskirts of the Local Group, although its sky position and distance indicate the nearest galaxy to be ∼500 kpc distant. Deep ground-based imaging resolves Tucana B into stars, and it displays a sparse red giant branch consistent with an old, metal-poor stellar population analogous to that seen in the ultra-faint dwarf galaxies of the Milky Way, albeit at fainter apparent magnitudes. Tucana B has a half-light radius of 80 ± 40 pc and an absolute magnitude of ${M}_{V}=-{6.9}_{-0.6}^{+0.5}$ mag (${L}_{V}=({5}_{-2}^{+4})\times {10}^{4}$ L⊙), which is again comparable to the Milky Way's ultra-faint satellites. There is no evidence for a population of young stars, either in the optical color–magnitude diagram or in GALEX archival ultraviolet imaging, with the GALEX data indicating $\mathrm{log}({\mathrm{SFR}}_{\mathrm{NUV}}/{M}_{\odot }\,{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1})\lt -5.4$ for star formation on ≲100 Myr timescales. Given its isolation and physical properties, Tucana B may be a definitive example of an ultra-faint dwarf that has been quenched by reionization, providing strong confirmation of a key driver of galaxy formation and evolution at the lowest mass scales. It also signals a new era of ultra-faint dwarf galaxy discovery at the extreme edges of the Local Group. © 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.D.J.S. acknowledges support from NSF grants AST-1821967 and 1813708. B.M.P. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-2001663. Research by D.C. is supported by NSF grant AST-1814208. A.K. acknowledges financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the "Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa" awarded to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709) and through the grant POSTDOC_21_00845 financed from the budgetary program 54a Scientific Research and Innovation of the Economic Transformation, Industry, Knowledge and Universities Council of the Regional Government of Andalusia. F.W. thanks the support provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant #HF2-51448 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. A.C. is supported by a Brinson Prize Fellowship at UChicago/KICP. K.S. acknowledges support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).Peer reviewe