We report the discovery of eight new ultra-faint dwarf galaxy candidates in the second year of optical imaging data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Six of these candidates are detected at high confidence, while two lowerconfidence candidates are identified in regions of non-uniform survey coverage. The new stellar systems are found by three independent automated search techniques and are identified as overdensities of stars, consistent with the isochrone and luminosity function of an old and metal-poor simple stellar population. The new systems are faint (M V > −4.7 mag) and span a range of physical sizes (17 pc < r 1/2 < 181 pc) and heliocentric distances (25 kpc < D e < 214 kpc). All of the new systems have central surface brightnesses consistent with known ultrafaint dwarf galaxies (μ  27.5 mag arcsec −2). Roughly half of the DES candidates are more distant, less luminous, and/or have lower surface brightnesses than previously known Milky Way satellite galaxies. Most of the

With the NEOWISE portion of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) project, we have carried out a highly uniform survey of the near-Earth object (NEO) population at thermal infrared wavelengths ranging from 3 to 22 µm, allowing us to refine estimates of their numbers, sizes, and albedos. The NEOWISE survey detected NEOs the same way whether they were previously known or not, subject to the availability of ground-based follow-up observations, resulting in the discovery of more than 130 new NEOs. The survey's uniform sensitivity, observing cadence, and image quality have permitted extrapolation of the 428 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) detected by NEOWISE during the fully cryogenic portion of the WISE mission to the larger population. We find that there are 981±19 NEAs larger than 1 km and 20,500±3000 NEAs larger than 100 m. We show that the Spaceguard goal of detecting 90% of all 1 km NEAs has been met, and that the cumulative size distribution is best represented by a broken power law with a slope of 1.32±0.14 below 1.5 km. This power law slope produces ∼ 13, 200±1,900 NEAs with D >140 m. Although previous studies predict another break in the cumulative size distribution below D ∼50-100 m, resulting in an increase in the number of NEOs in this size range and smaller, we did not detect enough objects to comment on this increase. The overall number for the NEA population between 100-1000 m is lower than previous estimates. The numbers of near-Earth comets and potentially hazardous NEOs will be the subject of future work.Road,

We present a catalog of 224 galaxy cluster candidates, selected through their Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect signature in the first 720 deg 2 of the South Pole Telescope (SPT) survey. This area was mapped with the SPT in the 2008 and 2009 austral winters to a depth of ∼ 18 µK CMB -arcmin at 150 GHz; 550 deg 2 of it was also mapped to ∼ 44 µK CMB -arcmin at 95 GHz. Based on optical imaging of all candidates and near-infrared imaging of the majority of candidates, we have found optical and/or infrared counterparts for 158 clusters. Of these, 135 were first identified as clusters in SPT data, including 117 new discoveries reported in this work. This catalog triples the number of confirmed galaxy clusters discovered through the SZ effect. We report photometrically derived (and in some cases spectroscopic) redshifts for confirmed clusters and redshift lower limits for the remaining candidates. The catalog extends to high redshift with a median redshift of z = 0.55 and maximum redshift of z = 1.37. Forty-five of the clusters have counterparts in the ROSAT bright or faint source catalogs from which we estimate X-ray fluxes. Based on simulations, we expect the catalog to be nearly 100% complete above M 500 ≈ 5 × 10 14 M h −1 70 at z 0.6. There are 121 candidates detected at signal-to-noise greater than five, at which the catalog purity is measured to be 95%. From this highpurity subsample, we exclude the z < 0.3 clusters and use the remaining 100 candidates to improve cosmological constraints following the method presented by Benson et al. (2011). Adding the cluster data to CMB+BAO+H 0 data leads to a preference for non-zero neutrino masses while only slightly reducing the upper limit on the sum of neutrino masses to m ν < 0.38 eV (95% CL). For a spatially flat wCDM cosmological model, the addition of this catalog to the CMB+BAO+H 0 +SNe results yields σ 8 = 0.807 ± 0.027 and w = −1.010 ± 0.058, improving the constraints on these parameters by a factor of 1.4 and 1.3, respectively. The larger cluster catalog presented in this work leads to slight improvements in cosmological constraints from those presented by Benson et al. (2011). These cosmological constraints are currently limited by uncertainty in the cluster mass calibration, not the size or quality of the cluster catalog. A multi-wavelength observation program to improve the cluster mass calibration will make it possible to realize the full potential of the final 2500 deg 2 SPT cluster catalog to constrain cosmology.