Speaker
Description
MOONS is the new Multi-Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph for the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO which will see its first light this year. This remarkable instrument combines, for the first time, the collecting power of an 8-m telescope, 1000 fibres with individual robotic positioners, and both low- and high-resolution simultaneous spectral coverage across the 0.64-1.8 μm wavelength range. MOONS will therefore provide the astronomical community with a powerful, world-leading instrument able to serve a wide range of Galactic, extragalactic and cosmological studies. In talk I will concentrate on the expected outcome of MOONRISE which is the main GTO extragalactic survey specifically aimed at obtaining key spectroscopic information for about half a million galaxies at 0.9 < z < 2.6, as well as for a few thousand galaxies around the epoch of reionisation (z ~ 6–8) and what this implies for Large-Scale Structure as well as environmental studies.
