Hector - a new massively multiplexed IFS instrument for the Anglo-Australian Telescope

Abstract

Hector will be the new massively-multiplexed integral field spectroscopy (IFS) instrument for the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) in Australia and the next main dark-time instrument for the observatory. Based on the success of the SAMI instrument, which is undertaking a 3400-galaxy survey, the integral field unit (IFU) imaging fibre bundle (hexabundle) technology under-pinning SAMI is being improved to a new innovative design for Hector. The distribution of hexabundle angular sizes is matched to the galaxy survey properties in order to image 90% of galaxies out to 2 effective radii. 50-100 of these IFU imaging bundles will be positioned by 'starbug' robots across a new 3-degree field corrector top end to be purpose-built for the AAT. Many thousand fibres will then be fed into new replicable spectrographs. Fundamentally new science will be achieved compared to existing instruments due to Hector's wider field of view (3 degrees), high positioning efficiency using starbugs, higher spectroscopic resolution (R~3000-5500 from 3727-7761A, with a possible redder extension later) and large IFUs (up to 30 arcsec diameter with 61-217 fibre cores). A 100,000 galaxy IFS survey with Hector will decrypt how the accretion and merger history and large-scale environment made every galaxy different in its morphology and star formation history. The high resolution, particularly in the blue, will make Hector the only instrument to be able to measure higher-order kinematics for galaxies down to much lower velocity dispersion than in current large IFS galaxy surveys, opening up a wealth of new nearby galaxy science.

arXiv commentSubmitted for SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 2016

References in corpus (15)

• Mass and environment as drivers of galaxy evolution in SDSS and zCOSMOS and the origin of the Schechter function
• Overview of the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey: Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory
• Adaptive spatial binning of integral-field spectroscopic data using Voronoi tessellations
• CALIFA, the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey: I. Survey presentation
• Dancing in the dark: galactic properties trace spin swings along the cosmic web
• Mass and Environment as Drivers of Galaxy Evolution II: The quenching of satellite galaxies as the origin of environmental effects
• The ATLAS${}^{3D}$ project - XXV: Two-dimensional kinematic analysis of simulated galaxies and the cosmological origin of fast and slow rotators
• Science With The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder
• Galaxy spin alignment in filaments and sheets: observational evidence
• Evidence for spin alignment of spiral and elliptical/S0 galaxies in filaments
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Revisiting Galaxy Classification Through High-Order Stellar Kinematics
• The velocity shear tensor: tracer of halo alignment
• Focal ratio degradation in lightly-fused hexabundles
• The cosmic history of the spin of dark matter haloes within the large scale structure
• Spin alignments of spiral galaxies within the large-scale structure from SDSS DR7

Cited by in corpus (21)

• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: the third and final data release
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: First detection of a transition in spin orientation with respect to cosmic filaments in the stellar kinematics of galaxies
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Quenching of star formation in clusters I. Transition galaxies
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: The internal orbital structure and mass distribution of passive galaxies from triaxial orbit-superposition Schwarzschild models
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: 3D spin alignment of spiral and S0 galaxies
• Alignment between filaments and galaxy spins from the MaNGA integral-field survey
• Recovering ${\lambda }_R$ and $V/\sigma$ from seeing-dominated IFS data
• Early-type galaxy spin evolution in the Horizon-AGN simulation
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: mass-kinematics scaling relations
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: Evidence for enriched accretion onto satellite galaxies in dense environments
• Accurate Identification of Galaxy Mergers with Stellar Kinematics
• HETDEX [OIII] Emitters I: A spectroscopically selected low-redshift population of low-mass, low-metallicity galaxies
• SDSS-IV MaNGA: Unveiling Galaxy Interaction by Merger Stages with Machine Learning
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: understanding observations of large-scale outflows at low redshift with EAGLE simulations
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Detection of Environmental Dependence of Galaxy Spin in Observations and Simulations Using Marked Correlation Functions
• 3D-M3: High-spatial resolution spectroscopy with extreme AO and 3D printed micro-lenslets
• HETDEX Pilot Survey. VI. [OIII] Emitters and Expectations for a Local Sample of Star Forming Galaxies in HETDEX
• The circular velocity and halo mass functions of galaxies in the nearby Universe
• A novel approach for calculating galaxy rotation curves using spaxel cross-correlation and iterative smoothing
• A MaNGA about the Legacy I: Connecting the Assembly of Stellar Halo with the Average Star Formation History in Low-Redshift Massive Galaxies
• Development of Integral Field Spectrographs to Revolutionize Spectroscopic Observations of Solar Flares and other Energetic Solar Eruptions