The GALAH Survey: Scientific Motivation
Abstract
The GALAH survey is a large high-resolution spectroscopic survey using the newly commissioned HERMES spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The HERMES spectrograph provides high-resolution (R ~28,000) spectra in four passbands for 392 stars simultaneously over a 2 degree field of view. The goal of the survey is to unravel the formation and evolutionary history of the Milky Way, using fossil remnants of ancient star formation events which have been disrupted and are now dispersed throughout the Galaxy. Chemical tagging seeks to identify such dispersed remnants solely from their common and unique chemical signatures; these groups are unidentifiable from their spatial, photometric or kinematic properties. To carry out chemical tagging, the GALAH survey will acquire spectra for a million stars down to V~14. The HERMES spectra of FGK stars contain absorption lines from 29 elements including light proton-capture elements, alpha-elements, odd-Z elements, iron-peak elements and n-capture elements from the light and heavy s-process and the r-process. This paper describes the motivation and planned execution of the GALAH survey, and presents some results on the first-light performance of HERMES.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.1502.04767,
title = {The GALAH Survey: Scientific Motivation},
author = {G. M. De Silva and K. C. Freeman and J. Bland-Hawthorn and S. Martell and E. Wylie de Boer and M. Asplund and S. Keller and S. Sharma and D. B. Zucker and T. Zwitter and B. Anguiano and C. Bacigalupo and D. Bayliss and M. A. Beavis and M. Bergemann and S. Campbell and R. Cannon and D. Carollo and L. Casagrande and A. R. Casey and G. Da Costa and V. D'Orazi and A. Dotter and L. Duong and A. Heger and M. J. Ireland and P. R. Kafle and J. Kos and J. Lattanzio and G. F. Lewis and J. Lin and K. Lind and U. Munari and D. M. Nataf and S. O'Toole and Q. A. Parker and W. Reid and K. J. Schlesinger and A. Sheinis and J. D. Simpson and D. Stello and Y-S. Ting and G. Traven and F. Watson and R. Wittenmyer and D. Yong and M. Zerjal},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.04767},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
16 pages, 7 figures