Circumgalactic H-alpha Spectrograph: Initial Results from the First Engineering Runs
Abstract
The Circumgalactic Medium (CGM) is an important reservoir of gas pooling in the gravitational potential well around a galaxy. Studying it provides important clues about missing baryonic matter in the universe. Our group has been developing the Circumgalactic H-alpha Spectrograph (CHaS), an integral field unit (IFU) spectrograph designed to detect faint H-alpha and other line emission from the ionized CGM of nearby galaxies. CHaS will be installed at the Hiltner 2.4 m telescope at the MDM Observatory in Arizona. CHaS obtains wide-field (10 arcminute) spectral imaging over a narrow band using a microlens array IFU coupled to a fast spectrograph. CHaS incorporates a Volume Phase Holographic grating and Schmidt collimator and camera for high throughput, high spectral resolution (R: 5000 to 10000) in 2.5 arcsecond diameter sky pixels (>60,000 separate spectra per frame). With CHaS we seek to obtain the deepest H-alpha images of the extended gas around nearby galaxies and observe the Doppler kinematics of accreting, outflowing and ram-pressure stripped gas with high precision. Here, we describe updates from our recent engineering runs at MDM, after we integrated our spectrograph's optical, electronic and mechanical components for the first time.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #235
- Pub Date:
- January 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AAS...23517529C