Stellar Halos from the The Dragonfly Edge-on Galaxies Survey

We present the primary results from the Dragonfly Edge-on Galaxies Survey, an exploration of the stellar halos of twelve nearby (d < 25 Mpc) edge-on disk galaxies with the Dragonfly Telephoto Array. The edge-on orientation of these galaxies allows their stellar halos to be explored with minimal obscuration by or confusion with the much brighter disk light. Galaxies in the sample span a range of stellar masses from 109.68 to 1010.88 M ⊙. We confirm that the wide range of stellar halo mass fractions previously seen for Milky Way-mass galaxies is also found among less massive spiral galaxies. The scatter in stellar halo mass fraction is large, but we do find a significant positive correlation between stellar halo mass fraction and total stellar mass when the former is measured beyond five half-mass radii. Reasonably good agreement is found with predictions from cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, although observed stellar halo fractions appear to be somewhat lower than expected from these simulations.