First Science with SAMI: A Serendipitously Discovered Galactic Wind in ESO 185-G031

• Main Authors: Fogarty, Lisa M. R., Bland-Hawthorn, Joss, Croom, Scott M., Green, Andrew W., Bryant, Julia J., Lawrence, Jon S., Richards, Samuel, Allen, James T., Bauer, Amanda E., Birchall, Michael N., Brough, Sarah, Colless, Matthew, Ellis, Simon C., Farrell, Tony, Goodwin, Michael, Heald, Ron, Hopkins, Andrew M., Horton, Anthony, Jones, D. Heath, Lee, Steve, Lewis, Geraint, López-Sánchez, Ángel R., Miziarski, Stan, Trowland, Holly, Leon-Saval, Sergio G., Min, Seong-Sik, Trinh, Christopher, Cecil, Gerald, Veilleux, Sylvain, Kreimeyer, Kory
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2012
• Subjects: Astrophysics of Galaxies astro-ph.GA; FOS Physical sciences; sami
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1211.0352; https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.0352

We present the first scientific results from the Sydney-AAO Multi-Object IFS (SAMI) at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. This unique instrument deploys 13 fused fibre bundles (hexabundles) across a one-degree field of view allowing simultaneous spatially-resolved spectroscopy of 13 galaxies. During the first SAMI commissioning run, targeting a single galaxy field, one object (ESO 185-G031) was found to have extended minor axis emission with ionisation and kinematic properties consistent with a large-scale galactic wind. The importance of this result is two-fold: (i) fibre bundle spectrographs are able to identify low-surface brightness emission arising from extranuclear activity; (ii) such activity may be more common than presently assumed because conventional multi-object spectrographs use single-aperture fibres and spectra from these are nearly always dominated by nuclear emission. These early results demonstrate the extraordinary potential of multi-object hexabundle spectroscopy in future galaxy surveys. : 12 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ 01/Nov/2012