The study of the internal kinematics and of the stellar populations of nearby galaxies

Abstract

The instrument BTFI (Brazilian Tunable Filter Imager), installed on the SOAR telescope, will go on-sky for the first science frames in 2014. This instrument was built in the last seven years in a collaborative effort between several Brazilian institutions, led by IAG/USP, LNA, INPE, in collaboration with the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM). The main objective of this proposal is to give our group (and indirectly also the rest of the Brazilian community which will have access to the instrument) the means to maximize the science return with the BTFI instrument. The main scientific goal we want to reach with BTFI is to improve our understanding of the kinematics of galaxies and therefore of their formation histories and evolution. Other goals are: (1) study metallicity gradients of nearby mergers and (2) study the nature and dynamical states of fossil and compact group galaxies. A second project which is the focus of this application is the T80-south, a robotic 80cm telescope, located at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory, in Chile. It will have an optical camera with a wide field of view of 2 square degrees with which we want to do a survey of 8000 sq degrees of sky called SPLUS. One of the goals of this proposal is to get prepared to use the data that will be collected in this survey.Among other projects, SPLUS will allow us to study the morphology and stellar populations of galaxies in nearby systems, study globular clusters around the most nearby galaxies and search for star-forming groups and clusters in the surveys for galaxy evolution studies. (AU)