Abstract

Poster - Splinter General   (Keksdose / virtual plenum)

The BlueMUSE project and the contributions by German partners

Weilbacher, Kelz, Roth, Steinmetz, Urrutia, Dreizler, Martens, Wendt
AIP, IAG, UP

BlueMUSE will be an optical medium spectral resolution integral-field-spectrograph to be installed on one of the telescopes of the VLT on Cerro Paranal (Chile). It will complement the very successful (and highly oversubscribed) MUSE instrument by offering seeing-limited, blue-optimised performance, to be able to record data down to the atmospheric cutoff over a similar area on the sky, but with twice the spectral resolution. The BlueMUSE white paper that led to the selection of BlueMUSE includes several science cases, sorted by topics: The Milky Way galaxy and Local Group (massive stars, globular clusters, ultra-faint dwarfs, ionized nebulae, comets); nearby galaxies (ISM and HII regions, extreme starbursts, low surface brightness galaxies, environmental effects in local clusters); and the distant universe (deep fields, gas flows around and between galaxies, Lyman-continuum emitters, gravitational lensing in clusters, first galaxy clusters). The BlueMUSE consortium includes several European institutes and ESO, led by CRAL (Lyon). From Germany the universities in Göttingen (IAG) and Potsdam (UP), and the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP) are participating partners. AIP’s work packages include the calibration unit and the development and coding of the data reduction software and pipeline for the Blue MUSE data cubes. IAG and UP are contributing work for the BlueMUSE science software. We will report on the status of the BlueMUSE project and the German contributions.