Studies of the central galaxy parsec with high-resolution spatial techniques

In force date
Call year
2014
Investigator
Almudena
Prieto Escudero
Amount granted to the IAC Consortium
105.270,00 €
Description

This is a multiwavelength study of the centre of the nearest and brightest galaxies at angular scales of a few parsecs. These resolutions, namely <0.1 in average, are currently available across a wide spectral range: in the IR with 8-10m class telescopes and state of the art observational techniques, in the optical-UV with HST, in cm with VLA and ATCA, in the submillimeter with ALMA. Our goal is to isolate, in physical scales, the spectrum of the nucleus of galaxies and confirm an universal presence of a central dark mass concentration at the centre. We aim at implementing super-resolution at GTC by building FRIDA. 
The proposal has two goals:
1. Consolidate the PARSEC group at the IAC, which is specialized in high spatial resolution techniques for IR astronomy such as adaptive optics, speckle and optical interferometry. The group is further responsible of the construction of the first adaptive optics (AO) instrument, FRIDA, for GTC (http://www.iac.es/project/frida/ IAC-PI: A. Prieto). The responsibilities of this team in FRDIA are twofold:
A. Technical: the group leads the definition/ development /integration of forteen FRIDA work packages. Namelly, these involve the control system, detector, system engineering, high level software and observing, calibration and data analysis tools.
B. Scientific: Identification and preparation of cutting edge scientific programs aimed at exploiting FRIDA unique capabilities. 
2. Pursue the use of the above techniques in the study of the central parsec of galaxies regardless of activity level and Hubble type. The only restrictions are the distance, limited to Virgo, to guaranty resolutions of a few parsecs, and the nucleus brightness, mv < 17, to guaranty the use of adaptative optics and interferometry. This project, so-called PARSEC (The central parsec of galaxias http://www.iac.es/project/parsec/main/index.php), is to our knowledge the only one in the community attempting the dual challenge of maximum angular resolution and spectral coverage. Our goal is to determine the condictions by which a galactic nucleus mutates from active to passive. The method is the comparative analysis of galaxy nuclei of different activity level but at equivalent physical scales, of their gas, plasma, dust and star formation conditions. PARSEC relays on data obtained at VLA, ATCA, ALMA, VLT / VLTI, Keck, HST and Chandra/NuStar observatories.