First science with SAMI: a serendipitously discovered galactic wind in ESO 185-G031

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 fiber bundles (hexabundles) across a one-degree field of view allowing simultaneous spatially resolved spectroscopy of 13 galaxies. During th...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astrophysical Journal
Main Authors: Fogarty, Lisa M. R., Bland-Hawthorn, Joss, Croom, ScottM., 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, Lopez-Sanchez, Angel R., Miziarski, Stan, Trowland, Holly, Leon-Saval, Sergio G., Min, Seong-Sik, Trinh, Christopher, Cecil, Gerald, Veilleux, Sylvain, Kreimeyer, Kory
Other Authors: Swinburne University of Technology
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: Institute of Physics 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/390052
https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/761/2/169
Description
Summary: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 fiber 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 ionization and kinematic properties consistent with a large-scale galactic wind. The importance of this result is twofold: (1) fiber bundle spectrographs are able to identify low surface brightness emission arising from extranuclear activity and (2) such activity may be more common than presently assumed because conventional multi-object spectrographs use single-aperture fibers 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.