Instrument Related Research Projects

OmegaCAM

OmegaCAM is a 1 square degree wide field, optical, 16k x 16k CCD camera for the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at Paranal observatory in Chile, which is expected to become operational at Paranal during the year 2005. OmegaCAM is built in collaboration with institutes in Italy and Germany. In Groningen the OmegaCEN group is developing software to handle the enormous dataflow that will come from OmegaCAM once it is operational.

WEB PAGE: http://www.astro.rug.nl/~omegacam/

VISIR

The mid-IR region is optimal for the study of "hot" dust (100 - 500 K) and of the gaseous component through a large number of ionic, atomic lines and molecular bands. The huge sky background makes it a hostile region to work in from the ground, but with very large telescopes such as ESO's VLT it will be possible to do science that can compete with satellites such as IRAS and ISO. VISIR is an infrared imager/spectrograph built by Saclay (Paris) and ASTRON, with strong involvement from the Kapteyn Institute. The instrument will be put on one of the VLT telescopes in the first half of 2004.

WEB PAGE: http://www.eso.org/instruments/visir/

LOFAR

LOFAR will be a major new multi-element, interferometric, imaging telescope designed for the 10-240 MHz frequency range in the radio. The revolutionary design of LOFAR will provide observers with extraordinary capabilities. LOFAR will consists of about 100 stations, covering an area of about 400 km in diameter, which each consist of more than 100 dual-polarization antenna systems. LOFAR, a large project of more than €100 million, is led by ASTRON, and has 18 partners, such as universities, research institutes and companies. The LOFAR project will lead to significant improvements in the infrastructure of  parts of the northern provinces in the Netherlands.

WEB PAGE: http://www.lofar.org

HIFI

HIFI, the Heterodyne instrument for the far-infrared, one of the three instruments for the Herschel Space Observatory,  will provide continuous coverage over the range of 480 to 1250 GHz in five bands, and 1410 to 1910 Ghz in two additional bands. It uses the heterodyne technique to achieve a resolution in the order of 3 million. The Herschel Space Observatory is one  of ESA's cornerstone missions, and is supposed to be launched in 2007. SRON is the principal investigator of HIFI. The instrument, by observing from space, will be avoiding the atmosphere which is mostly opaque in this region, and will provide us with important information on star formation, cold dust and gas, galaxies at very high redshift, and on solar system objects such as comets and asteroids.

WEB PAGE: http://www.sron.nl/divisions/lea/hifi/

PN.Spectrograph

Planetary Nebulae (PNe) are excellent probes of a distant galaxy's rotational dynamics. Through their strong [O III] emission line at the rest wavelength of 5007Å they can be easily detected and their radial velocity determined, allowing the stellar kinematics in the (otherwise inaccessible) outer regions of elliptical galaxies to be studied. The PNS project (involving several institutes in Europe and Australia) has buil a dedicated Planetary Nebula Spectrograph in order to push this technique to its limit. The instrument, working at the WHT at La Palma Observatory provides images that contain the information needed to obtain distances and dynamics in a single observation. This kind of study provides important results on the distribution of dark matter in galaxies.

WEB PAGE: http://www.astro.rug.nl/~pns/

SAURON

SAURON is an integral field spectrograph, built by a consortium consisting of the Observatoire de Lyon, the Sterrewacht Leiden, the Oxford University and NOVA. It has been operating since 1999 on the WHT at La Palma. It provides information about the kinematics of gas and stars, as well as stellar populations in an area of 40x30'' on the sky. SAURON is strongly linked with a scientific project which main goal is to understand the formation and evolution of elliptical and lenticular galaxies and of spiral bulges from 3D-observations. Details about the instrument can be found in Bacon et al. (2002),  MNRAS 326, 23.

WEB PAGE: http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/sauron/

OASIS

The optical integral-field spectrograph OASIS, built by the Observatoire de Lyon, formerly at the CFHT, has moved permanently to the WHT.
It is now installed at one of the science ports of the adaptive optics system NAOMI, in the WHT's new AO-dedicated, temperature-controlled, Nasmyth enclosure GRACE. OASIS was successfully commissioned on-sky with NAOMI in July 2003. The main difference between SAURON and OASIS is that OASIS, with a much smaller field, is able to obtain a much higher spatial resolution. OASIS is the only Integral Field Spectrograph in the world coupled to an Adaptive Optics System.

WEB PAGE: http://www.ing.iac.es/Astronomy/instruments/oasis/

GAIA

Gaia, an ESA Cornerstone Mission, will survey more than one billion stars in the optical, including many of the closest stars to the Sun. Its goal is to make the largest, most precise map of where we live in space by surveying an unprecedented one per cent of our Galaxy's population of 100 billion stars. The map is crucial to our modern understanding of the Milky Way, the Galaxy in which we live. The reason is that, during the mapping, Gaia will detect the motion of each star in its orbit around the centre of the Galaxy. Much of this motion was imparted upon each star during its birth and studying it allows astronomers to peer back in time, to when the Galaxy was first forming. Gaia is a large project with involvement of many universities, amongst which the University of Groningen.

WEB PAGE: http://astro.esa.int/GAIA/

MIDI

The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) consists in the coherent combination of the four VLT Unit Telescopes and of several moveable 1.8m Auxiliary Telescopes. One of the first instruments that are able to use the VLTI is MIDI, a mid-infrared interferometer, built by the Max Planck Institut für Astronomie in Heidelberg, ASTRON and NEVEC, the NOVA-ESO VLTI Expertise Center in Leiden. MIDI, which has been in the commissioning phase in 2003, has already provided the highest resolution images ever produced in the infrared.

WEB PAGE: http://www.astron.nl/midi/

MIRI

MIRI is the Mid-InfraRed Instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). MIRI will consist of an imager and a spectrometer. Part of the spectrometer will be built at ASTRON, with involvement from scientists of the dutch universities through NOVA with extra funding from NWO. MIRI will combine a large telescope with a low sky background, and will therefore be extremely effective in the Mid-IR. NASA's JWST will be launched around the year 2011. The telescope is designed for a lifetime of 10 years.

WEB PAGE: http://www.astron.nl/miri-ngst/

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