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Astronomy Seminar: Mapping Ten Thousand Nearby Galaxies in 3D

Date:
-
Location:
CP179
Speaker(s) / Presenter(s):
Renbin Yan (University of Kentucky)
Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) is an ongoing integral field spectroscopy survey carried out as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-IV. Started in the fall of 2014, MaNGA is utilizing multiple hexagonal fiber bundles fed to the BOSS spectrograph on the 2.5m Sloan Telescope to study the internal structure and formation history of roughly 10,000 nearby galaxies spanning a wide range in mass, type, and environment. Fiber bundles of various diameters ranging from 12 arcsec to 32 arcsec are used to match the apparent size distribution of galaxies. Most target galaxies will be covered out to 1.5-2.5 effective radii with a spatial resolution of 1-2kpc. Such spatially resolved spectroscopy beyond the central fibers covered by previous generation of SDSS can provide a great deal of information about each galaxy. I will give an overview of science goals of the survey, discuss the hardware design, survey sample design, observing strategy, and the data quality of MaNGA. I will also showcase some interesting examples from the 400 galaxies we have already observed.