Overview

MAUVE (MUSE and ALMA Unveiling the Virgo Environment) is a large program on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope 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 builds on the VERTICO (Virgo Environment Traced in CO) survey with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to map the full extent of the molecular gas disk of 40 late-type Virgo cluster galaxies at various infall stages using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE). These data will provide stellar and ionised gas kinematics and distributions, star-formation rates, and metal enrichment maps at ~100-200 pc scale, allowing us to investigate the link between cold gas and star formation when and where environmental processes are at play, and as a function of infall time. We will reconstruct detailed star-formation histories for a representative sample of cluster galaxies for the first time, assess the role and impact of outflows, and deliver a rich multi-wavelength data set with a huge legacy value for environmental studies, which no other sample currently available can provide.