Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes | 2019 Mar 01
In preparation for the new multi-object survey spectrograph, WEAVE, on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope, the astronomical community is working on deep imaging surveys to identify the astronomical objects which will be studied later in more detail with WEAVE.
WEAVE will allow astronomers to take optical spectra of up to ~1000 targets at the same time in a single exposure, or to carry out integral-field spectroscopy using 20 deployable mini integral-field units or one large integral-field unit.
Galaxies, like our Milky Way, can live in large groups with many others, the so-called galaxy clusters. Such associations contain a potpourri of galaxies with many different properties such as colours, ages, morphologies and brightness. Among this broad diversity there exists a bewildering population of large but extremely faint galaxies, called "ultra diffuse galaxies", and understanding their properties is important to understand how the environment of galaxies affects their evolution. Since they are so faint, they are easily perturbed by the cluster environment, and therefore are ideal probes to study what happens with galaxies in the dense cluster environment.
Using the capabilities of the WFC at the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) to explore large areas of the sky and detect faint ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs), a collaboration of astronomers in the Netherlands and Spain performed a study to investigate these galaxies in detail, the Kapteyn IAC WEAVE INT Clusters Survey (KIWICS). ...
Reviewing the frequency and central depletion of ultra-diffuse galaxies
in galaxy clusters from the KIWICS survey ~ Pavel E. Mancera Piña et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 481(4):4381 (Dec 2018) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sty2574
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1809.06359 > 17 Sep 2018
Kapteyn IAC WEAVE INT Clusters Survey (KIWICS) ~ Pavel E. Mancera Piña et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 485(1):1036 (May 2019) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz238
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1901.07577 > 22 Jan 2019