Newsletter 5 — December 2024
Message from the PIs
Welcome everyone to our end-of-year MAUVE Newsletter! The second half of 2024 has been an exciting period, marked by the reduction of all data collected so far — just in time for the team to enjoy an early Christmas present! In this issue, we are thrilled to report on our second internal data release of science-ready MUSE data cubes and their value-added data products, as well as to provide a progress update on the high-resolution ALMA CO program led by Jiayi. These new data mark a significant milestone for MAUVE as we enter the phase of statistical studies. While the full sample is far from complete, these first 14 galaxies span a wide range of properties and infalling stages, offering exciting opportunities for analysis. We eagerly look forward to the submission of the first papers based on these data in the coming year. And there are even more reasons to celebrate: successful telescope time proposals and our very first MAUVE graduates! While much of our recent focus has been on data reduction and quality control, it has been immensely rewarding to see the younger generation taking ownership of the scientific exploration of this rich dataset. We hope to inspire and welcome even more students and early-career researchers to dive into the vast potential of MAUVE’s data next year. Enjoy the newsletter, and best wishes for a relaxing break and exciting MAUVE science in 2025! — Barbara & LucaMAUVE Team, Survey Management & Communication
New members. We welcome Woorak Choi (McMaster University) to the MAUVE Team. Woorak brings expertise on high-resolution (GMC-scale) molecular gas studies with ALMA and is interested in studying barred galaxies and environmental effects.
Conferences and science talks. The MAUVE team has been highly active in showcasing our first scientific results at various international conferences. Highlights include Luca’s presentation at the IAU General Assembly in Cape Town, Adam Watts' contribution at A Decade of Discoveries with MUSE and Beyond in Garching, as well as Adam's and Jamie McGregor’s talks at the ESO/SKA Cosmic Ecosystems in Radio and Optical meeting in Busselton, Australia. We would also like to extend our gratitude to everyone who has participated in and contributed to our monthly VERTICO/MAUVE science meetings throughout the year. Copies of all conference presentations and recordings of our monthly meetings are available on the MAUVE wiki.
Follow-up Observations. Congratulations to PhD student Sriram Sankar for being awarded 15 hours of high-priority MeerKAT time to follow up the ionized outflows in NGC4064 in HI and radio continuum! Observations are expected to take place early next year. These new data will nicely complement those already obtained by Adam for NGC4383 and, together with the high-resolution ALMA data collected by Jiayi, will enable an exciting multi-phase study of galaxies above and below the star-forming main sequence.
Science Project Proposals. We’d like to remind the team to keep an eye on our Science Projects page on the wiki. There are currently six approved projects, with at least three on track to submit papers next year. As always, regular updates will be shared during our monthly science meetings, but don’t hesitate to reach out directly to the project leads for more information. If you’re interested in submitting a project proposal, please remember to fill out the proposal form on our wiki.
MAUVE Graduations. We are thrilled to congratulate our very first MAUVE graduates, Amy Attwater and Jamie McGregor! Both recently completed their Master’s degrees at UWA with dissertations titled “Characterising Ionised Gas Outflows in Virgo Galaxies with MAUVE” (Amy) and “Reconstructing the Recent Life of Cluster Galaxies: The Curious Case of IC3392” (Jamie). Amy and Jamie are currently enjoying a well-deserved break, but they plan to work on two papers presenting their research early next year — so stay tuned! We also wish them the very best in their search for PhD opportunities and hope they will continue to engage with the MAUVE project in the future.
Observing Status
Our galaxies were not observable in the second half of this year, so we did not get new data. As reported in our previous newsletter, we now have 14 completed galaxies out of 37 (the remaining 3 have data from the PHANGS-MUSE survey). We are looking forward to the next observing cycle starting very soon.
Data Reduction WG
This semester saw a significant effort dedicated to data reduction activities, culminating in the full reduction of our 14 galaxies, including the re-reduction of the 5 galaxies from our internal DR1. A lot of work has also gone into expanding our range of Quality Control (QC) checks and streamlining the workflow, with the two PIs taking care of different steps of the reduction process. While we are reasonably happy with the current state of our data reduction (with many thanks to Eric Emsellem!), there’s always room for improvement. As seen in our new release, some issues remain (e.g., NGC4192), and we’ve identified areas where significant progress can still be made. We hope that time and resources will allow us to address these improvements in the coming year. A big thank you to Toby Brown, who has been leading the production of MAUVE data products in parallel with our DR efforts (see his update below). If you’re interested in contributing to data reduction and getting your hands dirty, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!Data Products WG
The currently released data products are obtained using the nGIST pipeline to generate 2D Voronoi binned maps and extract stellar kinematics, stellar population properties, star formation histories, and gas emission line fluxes and kinematics. Additionally, we provide 3D continuum-only and emission line-only data cubes. A special thank you to Amelia Fraser-McKelvie for coordinating the nGIST development that made these products possible. nGIST also produces stellar line strengths maps, but these have not yet been released as they haven't fully passed quality control. For the gas emission-line fluxes and kinematic maps, work is also underway to produce native-resolution maps using a multithreshold approach. This approach uses a non-parametric signal detection method on the unbinned cubes, commonly applied to radio datasets (see Sun et al. 2018, Brown et al. 2021). Each technique has its own advantages and disadvantages depending on your science goals. The data are exceptional and jam packed with exciting scientific potential. Please explore and contact Toby if you have any questions or suggestions for modifications or additions. Our goal is make great science as easy as possible for you, so we welcome feedback on both scientific and technical aspects. Lastly, a reminder that the data are available on Data Central, but also on the CANFAR cloud storage (VOSpace), and the CANFAR Science Platform (contact Toby if you need access to CANFAR resources). — Toby
MAUVE follow up: the high-resolution ALMA CO program
We have made quite some progress on the MAUVE-ALMA high-resolution CO(2-1) mapping program. The latest round of data reduction (v0.2) includes full 12m+7m+tp observations for 10 MAUVE galaxies. A collage of their CO velocity fields on matched angular scale is shown below (omitting one galaxy with non-detection). We have also coordinated a first round of quality assurance on the v0.2 data products and solicited very helpful feedback from many volunteers (from the MAUVE, VERTICO, and PHANGS teams). Jiayi is now working on incorporating this feedback into the next round of data reduction, so that a set of science-ready data products can be provided to the team in early 2025. If you have science ideas with the v0.2 data products or any questions about data reduction, please do not hesitate to get in touch with Jiayi. — Jiayi