Speaker
Description
The life of galaxies is regulated by the flow of gas in and out of galactic disks, hence a detailed understanding of how galaxies exchange material with their surroundings and what physical mechanisms can affect this flow is a key factor for understanding galaxy evolution. The environment in which galaxies reside plays an important role, as the effectiveness and importance of the different processes is ambient dependent. Nonetheless, while we recently made many fundamental steps forward in understanding what drives gas flows in galaxies hosted in clusters; we have not yet a solid ground to build up a complete understanding of environmental processes in less extreme environments, which are those hosting the vast majority of galaxies. The key question remains open: what is the importance of each of these processes in regulating the whole galaxy population, as a function of galaxy mass, redshift and position within the large-scale cosmic structure?
VST-MAGNET (Mechanisms Affecting Galaxies Nearby and Environmental Trends with VST) is a OmegaCAM Large Programme approved in P3. Its goal is to provide transformative new observational evidence on this open issue. We are carrying out a narrow-band imaging survey providing Hα emission at z between 0 and 0.04 on a 65 deg2 sky area that includes galaxy groups and associations in filaments of the cosmic web. These data will provide deep spatially resolved information of the distribution of the ionized gas and star forming regions in galaxies and will be used to shed unprecedented light on the efficiency of the different environmental mechanisms and of star-formation quenching for galaxies in a wide range of stellar masses (at least down to 1e8 solar masses).
I will present the status of the project, the strategies developed for the data reduction analysis of the VST data and some preliminary results.