First Science with SDSS-IV MaNGA
First Results from SDSS-IV MaNGA
MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory) is a 6-year SDSS-IV (http://www.sdss.org.) survey that will obtain integral field spectroscopy data from 3600 \AA\ to 10300 \AA\ for a representative sample of over 10000 nearby galaxies.
MaNGA will take advantage of the SDSS infrastructure (telescope and spectrographs) and make use of newly designed hexagonal fibre bundles to obtain spatially resolved spectroscopy of nearby galaxies from a mass-selected sample out to 1.5 effective radii.
IFS observations will allow us to study the kinematics of the gas and stars, infer chemical abundances, SFRs, stellar masses, dynamical masses, star formation histories, presence of AGN and a suite of other important parameters with unprecedented detail.
All the data, in a fully reduced and easy-to-access form, will be made available to the community following regular data releases, as from previous SDSS surveys.
MaNGA survey operations have started in July 2014, after a successful commissioning run in March 2014 and a prototype run in January 2014. In this work we describe the data obtained during the January 2014 prototype run. The prototype hardware, observing strategy and sample selection all differ from the MaNGA survey quality data, however the data presented here should represent a fair preview of what MaNGA will soon be delivering.
With this prototype MaNGA data we perform a careful analysis of the emission line properties, investigating the properties of the ionised gas component and gas phase chemical abundances. To get to know more about these preliminary results, have a look at the paper on ArXiv: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014arXiv1410.7781B
image credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration, and A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University).
Image Credit (Fig. 1): Dana Berry / SkyWorks Digital, Inc., David Law, SDSS Collaboration Hubble Space Telescope