Galaxy
And Mass
Assembly
GAMA is an international project (PI S. Driver,
Univ. of St. Andrews) to exploit the latest generation
of ground-based wide-field
survey facilities to study galaxy formation and evolution. GAMA will bring
together data from the
Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT),
the
VLT Survey telescope (VST),
the
Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), and the
Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) in order
to construct a state-of-the-art database of ~250,000 galaxies in the local
Universe over a 200 deg2 region of sky.
ESO's Cerro Paranal Observatory in Chile,
the place of VISTA and VST.
UCLan will be involved in the
multi-wavelength analysis of the GAMA data, in
particular in the dust emission observations of the optical selected galaxies
and in the analysis of the effects of dust on the optical SEDs and morphologies
of galaxies. We will use our panchromatic SED modelling tool to derive for the
first time intrinsic physical parameters
like dust opacities, star-formation
rates (SFRs) and star-formation histories on an object by object base.
-
Opacities:
For the first time we will assess how the opacity varies with
morphological type and mass, sidestepping the biases inherent in any
statistical determination of opacities.
-
SFRs:
The SFRs derived for the galaxies in the GAMA are sensitive not only to the
SFR of the ionizing stars, as probed by optical emission line surveys, but
also to the
longer-lived sources of non-ionizing UV photons. Differences between the two
estimates will probe systematic variation in the upper mass cut-off of the
initial stellar mass function with macroscopic properties mass, morphology,
environment. We will also empirically establish the
expected physical link between disk opacity and SFR for the full population
of local Universe galaxies. Apart from this, the well defined statistical
nature of the GAMA sample will enable the SFRs derived for individual
galaxies to be used to calculate the density of SF in the local
Universe, including the contribution of dwarf galaxies. This number will be a
fundamental benchmark for all theories of structure
formation incorporating a physical description of the conversion of
gas into stars.
Return to: Main Page