Newsletter 2 — June 2023
Message from the PIs
Welcome everyone to our second MAUVE Newsletter! We have been keeping quiet for a few months, but a lot has happened in the meantime, especially on the data reduction front, as you can read below. We warmly thank Amelia, Adam, Eric, Toby & Lodo for all their work on the data reduction and creation of MAUVE value-added data products. And... we got MUSE data!! The MAUVE survey officially started on January 17th and, while observations have progressed at a much slower pace than expected, the data obtained so far are even richer and more exciting than anticipated. Thus, it is now time for our first MAUVE Team meeting, which will take place in a couple of weeks. We hope to virtually see many of you at the meeting, when we will also open a call for the first round of science projects based on the data collected so far. In the meantime, Adam Watts has been busy working on the first official MAUVE paper, presenting the analysis of the outflow in NGC4383 that you have all seen in our proposal. It has also been a great pleasure to see many MAUVE team members in person at the recent ASTRO 3D (the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions) Annual Science Meeting, which took place in Western Australia at the end of May. On that occasion, we had the first two official MAUVE talks: "Introducing MAUVE: Radio and IFS surveys joining forces to understand the gas cycle in clusters of galaxies" by Luca and "MAUVE-over M82, there is a new outflow on the street" by Adam. A copy of both talks can be found on our wiki. As always, please get in touch with us if you are interested in helping with any aspects of the survey (data processing, creation of value-added products, quality control, follow-up programs, etc.). Enjoy the newsletter, and we hope to virtually see you all very soon! — Barbara & LucaMAUVE Team, Survey Management & Communication
In the past few months we have welcomed a few new members: Eric Emsellem (ESO Garching), Andrew Battisti (ANU) and Hye-Jin (or Hayden) Park (ANU) — welcome all to the team!
Regarding communication, a reminder to make sure that you can access our Slack channel (who you all have already been invited to) and MAUVE wiki (see Internal tab on the web site), which hosts useful resources, information on the MAUVE emailing lists and team policies. To access the wiki, you need an account on Data Central (see the "#resources" channel on our Slack space for details).
Lastly, as we are entering conference season, please do not hesitate to get in touch with the PIs if you wish to advertise MAUVE (useful material can be found on the "Resources" page on our wiki).
Observing Status
MAUVE observations started in ESO Period 110 and were planned to be completed within 4 ESO Periods. We are now reaching the end of Period 111 for Virgo visibility, thus should be near the half mark of the survey, with 18 completed galaxies. However, scheduling by ESO did not go according to plan, so we have completed 4 galaxies and have partial coverage for another two. Hopefully, more data will come in the next 2 weeks.
While this is partly disappointing, there are a few reasons for this and we knew that carrying out a large program on Virgo with the VLT would be challenging. Nevertheless, we are very excited by the quality and richness of the MUSE data — a careful inspection of the data cubes immediately reveals unexpected outflows and other surprising features, hence we can already do a lot of interesting science with these first objects! These of course can be combined with the 3 galaxies with archival data from PHANGS, and with the wealth of multi-wavelength data already at hand, especially from the VERTICO ALMA survey. Looking at the glass half full, this has also given us more time to get up-to-speed with the data reduction and design of our value-added data product workflow. Morevover, in the next six months we will have more time to further improve our data analysis and be even better prepared when the next galaxies are observed in 2024.