Legacy Surveys of Star Formation, Gas, and Dust in the Local Volume
Abstract
Over the past few years increasing attention has focussed on establishing a complete census of galaxies in the Local Volume (roughly within a radius of 11 Mpc around the Milky Way), and obtaining complete multi-wavelength observations of their stellar contents, interstellar contents, and star formation rates. These surveys offer the only truly complete inventory of galaxy populations over the full range of stellar masses and types, and address the chronic problems of incompleteness that have plagued most large extragalactic surveys to date. The observations offer an especially powerful probe of dwarf galaxies, which are the dominant constituent of any local volume-limited survey, and whose study has been especially prone to observational incompleteness and selection biases in the past. The results of these surveys reveal evolutionary patterns that are distinct from those of more massive galaxies, and the physical insights revealed offer important clues for understanding galaxy evolution over the entire mass spectrum.
This session will highlight several recent Legacy and Treasury surveys with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, the VLA, and other groundbased telescopes, which taken together are producing a comprehensive, multi-wavelength characterization of galaxies in the Local Volume. Most of the data products from these surveys are being posted in public archives, to provide reference data for future surveys and opportunities for archival science investigations. The talks that follow will highlight individual results from these surveys, and will illustrate the strong astrophysical synergies that emerge from the combination of these complementary surveys.- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #215
- Pub Date:
- January 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010AAS...21520201K