as intermediate or transitional type satellite galaxies. For example, Phoenix and LGS3 are classified as intermediate types that appear to be transitioning from dwarf irregulars to dwarf spheroidals. Furthermore, the Large Magellanic Cloud is considered to be in the process of transitioning from a dwarf spiral to a dwarf irregular. Formation of satellite galaxies According to the standard model of cosmology (known as the ΛCDM model), the formation of satellite galaxies is intricately connected to the observed large-scale structure of the Universe. Specifically, the ΛCDM model is based on the premise that the observed large-scale structure is the result of a bottom-up hierarchical process that began after the recombination epoch in which electrically neutral hydrogen atoms were formed as a result of free electrons and protons binding together. As the ratio of neutral hydrogen to free protons and electrons grew, so did fluctuations in the baryonic matter density. These fluctuations rapidly grew to the point that they became comparable to dark matter density fluctuations. Moreover, the smaller mass fluctuations grew to nonlinearity, became virialized (i.e. reached gravitational equilibrium), and were then hierarchically clustered within successively larger bound systems. The gas within these bound systems condensed and rapidly cooled into cold dark matter halos that steadily increased in size by coalescing together and accumulating additional gas via a process known as accretion. The largest bound objects formed from this process are known as superclusters, such as the Virgo Supercluster, that contain smaller clusters of galaxies that are themselves surrounded by even smaller dwarf galaxies. Furthermore, in this model dwarfs galaxies are considered to be the fundamental building blocks that give rise to more massive galaxies, and the satellites that are observed around these galaxies are the dwarfs that have yet to be consumed by their host. Accumulation of mass in dark matter halos A crude yet useful method to determine how dark matter halos progressively gain mass through mergers of less massive halos can be explained using the excursion set formalism, also known as the extended Press-Schechter formalism (EPS). Among other things, the EPS formalism can be used to infer the fraction of mass that originated from collapsed objects of a specific mass at an earlier time by applying the statistics of Markovian random walks to the trajectories of mass elements in -space, where and represent the mass variance and overdensity, respectively. In particular the EPS formalism is founded on the