Friday, December 16, 2011

1112.3367 (Scott M. Croom et al.)

The Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph (SAMI)    [PDF]

Scott M. Croom, Jon S. Lawrence, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Julia J. Bryant, Lisa Fogarty, Samuel Richards, Michael Goodwin, Tony Farrell, Stan Miziarski, Ron Heald, D. Heath Jones, Steve Lee, Matthew Colless, Sarah Brough, Andrew M. Hopkins, Amanda E. Bauer, Michael N. Birchall, Simon Ellis, Anthony Horton, Sergio Leon-Saval, Geraint Lewis, A. R. Lopez-Sanchez, Seong-Sik Min, Christopher Trinh, Holly Trowland
We demonstrate a novel technology that combines the power of the multi-object spectrograph with the spatial multiplex advantage of an integral field spectrograph (IFS). The Sydney-AAO Multi-object IFS (SAMI) is a prototype wide-field system at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) that allows 13 imaging fibre bundles ("hexabundles") to be deployed over a 1-degree diameter field of view. Each hexabundle comprises 61 lightly-fused multimode fibres with reduced cladding and yields a 75 percent filling factor. Each fibre core diameter subtends 1.6 arcseconds on the sky and each hexabundle has a field of view of 15 arcseconds diameter. The fibres are fed to the flexible AAOmega double-beam spectrograph, which can be used at a range of spectral resolutions (R=lambda/delta(lambda) ~ 1700-13000) over the optical spectrum (3700-9500A). We present the first spectroscopic results obtained with SAMI for a sample of galaxies at z~0.05. We discuss the prospects of implementing hexabundles at a much higher multiplex over wider fields of view in order to carry out spatially--resolved spectroscopic surveys of 10^4 to 10^5 galaxies.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3367

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