Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter 4MOST   (MW-0337)

Galaxy evolution with WAVES

Joe Liske
University of Hamburg

The Wide Area VISTA Extragalactic Survey (WAVES) is the main galaxy evolution survey within the joint 4MOST Survey Programme. WAVES is designed to study the growth of structure and mass on scales of ~1 kpc to ~10 Mpc over a 7 Gyr timeline. On the largest length scales (1 – 10 Mpc) WAVES will compare the emergence of large-scale structure in the form of groups, filaments and voids with the Cold Dark Matter paradigm. At intermediate scales (10 kpc – 1 Mpc) WAVES will probe the size and mass distribution of galaxy groups, as well as the galaxy merger rates, directly witnessing the assembly of dark matter halos and stellar mass. On the smallest scales (1 – 10 kpc) WAVES will provide accurate environmental measurements to complement high-resolution space-based imaging to study the mass and size evolution of galaxy bulges, discs and bars. WAVES will provide a panchromatic legacy dataset of ~1.6 million galaxies, firmly linking the very low (z < 0.1) and intermediate (z ~ 0.8) redshift Universe. In this talk I will give an overview of the WAVES project, its science goals and spectroscopic 4MOST component, and present first results from data obtained during the Survey Programme Validation phase.