WEAVE
WEAVE (WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer) is a new multi-object survey spectrograph for the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, on La Palma in the Canary Islands. WEAVE's fibre-fed spectrograph comprises two arms, one optimised for the blue and one for the red, and offers two possible spectroscopic resolutions, 5000 and 20,000. Its wide-ranging science goals cover various fields of Galactic and extragalactic astronomy. KICC researchers are involved in the WEAVE-QSO survey, which is designed to optimise quasar absorption science through the measurement of Lyman-alpha absorption and other intergalactic medium (IGM; see link) absorbers. WEAVE-QSO will offer unparalleled spectral resolution (mostly R=5000, but also R=20,000) in a large-scale spectroscopic survey of the IGM, and will provide very high signal-to-noise data through high levels of completeness to bright quasars. KICC researchers are using WEAVE-QSO to investigate the clustering of absorbers at the smallest separation, which provides the information on cosmological growth of structure as well as IGM content. Our programme leverages the expertise of the Cambridge Astronomy Survey Unit (CASU), which is contributing to the key data-reduction development of WEAVE (see link). KICC researchers are leading several projects on the matter distribution imprinted on the IGM, thermal evolution in the post-reionization era, and the nature of dark matter.
- Dr Vid Irsic (WEAVE-QSO P1d science team lead)