MOONS Surveys of the Milky Way and its Satellites
Abstract
The study of resolved stellar populations in the Milky Way and other Local Group galaxies can provide us with a fossil record of their chemo-dynamical and star-formation histories over timescales of many billions of years. In the galactic components and stellar systems of the Milky Way and its satellites, individual stars can be resolved. Therefore, they represent a unique laboratory in which to investigate the details of the processes behind the formation and evolution of the disc and dwarf/irregular galaxies. MOONS at the VLT represents a unique combination of an efficient infrared multi-object spectrograph and a large-aperture 8-m-class telescope which will sample the cool stellar populations of the dense central regions of the Milky Way and its satellites, delivering accurate radial velocities, metallicities, and other chemical abundances for several millions of stars over its lifetime (see Cirasuolo et al., this issue). MOONS will observe up to 1000 targets across a 25-arcminute field of view in the optical and near-infrared (0.6-1.8 micron) simultaneously. A high-resolution (R~19700) setting in the H band has been designed for the accurate determination of stellar abundances such as alpha, light, iron-peak and neutron-capture elements.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2009.00635,
title = {MOONS Surveys of the Milky Way and its Satellites},
author = {O. A. Gonzalez and A. Mucciarelli and L. Origlia and M. Schultheis and E. Caffau and P. Di Matteo and S. Randich and A. Recio-Blanco and M. Zoccali and P. Bonifacio and E. Dalessandro and R. P. Schiavon and E. Pancino and W. Taylor and E. Valenti and A. Rojas-Arriagada and G. Sacco and K. Biazzo and M. Bellazzini and M. -R. L. Cioni and G. Clementini and R. Contreras Ramos and P. de Laverny and C. Evans and M. Haywood and V. Hill and R. Ibata and S. Lucatello and L. Magrini and N. Martin and B. Nisini and N. Sanna and M. Cirasuolo and R. Maiolino and J. Afonso and S. Lilly and H. Flores and E. Oliva and S. Paltani and L. Vanzi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.00635},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
6 pages, 2 figures, Published on the ESO Messenger No. 180