Overview

MAUVE (MUSE and ALMA Unveiling the Virgo Environment) is a multiwavelength program with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) designed to track the influence of the environment on the gas-star formation cycle of cluster galaxies during their infall.

As satellite galaxies plunge deeply into clusters, cold gas in their outer disks is stripped by the interaction with the surrounding hot intracluster medium. However, even in the most extreme environments satellites do not usually end up devoid of their cold gas reservoirs, and star formation could potentially continue for billions of years in their inner regions. Thus, it is unclear how and when star formation in these systems will cease. Answering this question requires sub-kpc observations of the interstellar medium (in particular cold atomic and molecular gas), stellar and star formation properties of cluster galaxies at different stages of their infall.

To this end, MAUVE maps the full extent of the molecular gas disk of 40 late-type Virgo cluster galaxies at various infall stages with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on the VLT and with a complementary large program on ALMA in Band 6 (led by J. Sun). These programs build on the VERTICO (Virgo Environment Traced in CO) and VIVA (VLA Imaging of Virgo in Atomic gas) surveys. The new VLT/MUSE data will provide stellar and ionised gas properties at ~100-200 pc scale, whereas the new ALMA observations will probe molecular gas structures and dynamics down to ~50 pc scale. This powerful combination will allow us to investigate the link between cold gas and star formation as a function of infall time, assess the role and impact of outflows, and determine when and where in galaxies environmental processes are at play. MAUVE will deliver a rich multi-wavelength data set with a huge legacy value for environmental studies, which no other sample currently available can provide.