Newsletter 3 — December 2023


Message from the PIs

Welcome everyone to our third MAUVE Newsletter!

With 2023 coming to an end, and looking foward to a well-deserved holiday break, there is a lot to celebrate! Main highlights include:

  • The start of MAUVE observations in January
  • Our first team meeting at the end of June
  • Our first internal data release in September
  • A successful ALMA proposal by Jiayi Sun (congratulations!) to obtain high-resolution CO(2-1) observations of MAUVE galaxies
  • Our first progress report submitted to ESO in November
  • The very first MAUVE refereed paper, led by Adam Watts, submitted for publication last week.

Continuing on the theme of celebrations, congratulations also to Amelia Fraser-McKelvie who started an ESO Fellowship in Garching, and to Adam Watts and Toby Brown, currently on parental leave, for the birth of their babies! We welcome both of them as our youngest honorary team members!

We had a few additional initiatives planned for 2023 (i.e., the start of monthly team meetings and the official release of our value-added data products), but these have been delayed due to personal issues in the last few months. It has been an intense year, and we would like to thank you all for your contributions to this project.

Enjoy the newsletter, and best wishes for a refreshing break and exciting MAUVE science in 2024!

— Barbara & Luca

MAUVE Team, Survey Management & Communication

Since June 2023, 9 new members have joined MAUVE: Yago Ascasibar (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Amy Attwater (ICRAR/UWA), Sreeja S. Kartha and Ujjwal Krishnan (Christ University), Tutku Kolcu (Liverpool John Moores University), Andrei Ristea (ICRAR-UWA), Kristine Spekkens (Royal Military College of Canada and Queen's University), Jiayi Sun (McMaster University) Sabine Thater (University of Vienna) — welcome all to the team!

With the survey activities and science exploitation ramping up next year, we strongly encourage all team members to make sure that they have access to our MAUVE wiki. There you can find information on how to download our science-ready data cubes, science projects, all major conference presentations delivered so far by the team and the progress report that we submitted to ESO in November (look for the "Resources" tab on the wiki). The progress report is going to be particularly interesting for new members to see where we are and have a glimpse of some of the science that we are already working on. If you realise that you do not have access to our wiki, please follow the instructions in the #resources channel on our Slack.

Congratulations to Adam Watts and team for submitting the very first MAUVE paper to MNRAS: "A 6 kpc bipolar outflow launched from NGC 4383, one of the most HI-rich galaxies in the Virgo cluster." The figure below shows the galaxy and its outflow. A copy of the paper can be found on our wiki.

We plan on starting monthly MAUVE science team meetings in early 2024. These are meant to be informal, online meetings to share preliminary results and discuss exciting science, to allow the team to engage with ongoing work and contribute early on to future publications. Stay tuned for more information in January 2024. If you are thinking about proposing a MAUVE project, please fill in the form on the wiki (where you can also specify if you will need VERTICO and/or VESTIGE data).

Moving on to conferences, initial MAUVE results have been presented in several forums in 2023: New views on feedback & the baryon cycle in galaxies (Healesville, Australia, July); 2023 ACAMAR workshop: Gas in galaxies (Perth, Australia, July); Galaxy transformation across space and time (3rd Australia-ESO meeting; Canberra, Australia, September); and A journey through galactic environments (Porto Ercole, Italy, September).

Looking forward to 2024, there are already several interesting conferences lined up. Jiayi Sun will be presenting MAUVE and his ALMA program at the 243rd AAS meeting in just a few weeks, and Luca will highlight MAUVE at The physical processes shaping the stellar and gaseous histories of galaxies, which will take place in Pisa, Italy, in the week of May 27-31 2024. Lastly, both MAUVE PIs are planning to attend the IAU General Assembly in Cape Town, August 6-15 2024 (the deadline for early registration is March 1st 2024). We hope to see many of you there in person, and some exciting MAUVE talks!


The NGC 4383 outflow. Left: DESI grz three-colour image from the Legacy Sky Survey, with the outline of our MUSE pointings shown by thin white lines. Middle: integrated Hα flux map, with the DESI r-band 25th mag arcsec−2 isophote overlaid in black. Right: Hα flux-weighted first moment (line-of-sight velocity) map.

Observing Status

As you all know, MAUVE observations started in January 2023 and the last OB for 2023 was observed at the end of June. We are only at 10% completion rate (13 out of 67 OBs observed to date), compared to nearly 50% as expected from the original time allocation. This is not very surprising given the MUSE back-log and the challenges of observing Virgo from Paranal. Thus, we expect observations to continue in 2025 and, potentially, also in 2026.

The OBs for period 113 have already been submitted, and we expect to be working on the OBs for period 114 (the last OBs of the program!) early in the new year. Observing should pick up again very soon (we expect data to start coming through in mid-January), and we hope that 2024 will bring much more MAUVE data than this year.


Data Reduction WG

The two MAUVE PIs had a lot of fun taking over the data reduction efforts from May, reducing all current data and developing some critical quality control checks that have allowed us to identify (and in some cases correct) some issues with the data. It has been an important step to fully appreciate the quality of the data, and we are grateful to Eric Emsellem for sharing his knowledge (and pipeline!) with us and to Adam Watts and Amelia Fraser-McKelvie for the initial set-up of our data reduction workflow.

Science-ready data cubes of the 5 galaxies completed so far were circulated to the team in September and instructions on how to get these can be found on the wiki. Please do not hesitate to contact us in case you find any issues with the data. We are aware of a few areas where improvements can be made, but the current versions of the cubes should be very good already for most scientific analysis.


Data Products WG

Before going on parental leave in early November, WG lead Toby Brown has been very busy working on the creation of the first value-added data products for MAUVE. In parallel, Luca has been developing a Quality Control strategy that has helped identifying and correcting some issues with the data products. Unfortunately, work has proceeded more slowly in the last couple of months and, while we are very close to having science-ready data products, we have decided to postpone an official release to the team. However, please contact us if you are interested in getting preliminary access to these data.

More generally, the production, quality control checks and continuous improvement of our value-added products will be arguably one of our main focuses in the new year, but the one for which we are very much people-power limited at this stage. So, if you or your postdoc, student, etc. would like to get involved and help, please do not hesitate to get in touch!