2015/06/29 by Sofia Feltzing, Feltzing, Sofia
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) #astro-ph.IM #astro-ph.SR
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1506.08642
To appear in the proceedings of the conference "Multi-Object Spectroscopy in the Next Decade: Big Questions, Large Surveys and Wide Fields", held in Santa Cruz de La Palma, Canary Islands from 2nd to 6th March 2015. Eds. I. Skillen and S. Trager
arxiv created 2015/06/29 · arxiv updated 2015/06/30
Galactic Archeology is about exploring the Milky Way as a galaxy by, mainly, using its (old) stars as tracers of past events and thus figure out the formation and evolution of our Galaxy. I will briefly outline some of the key scientific aspects of Galactic Archeology and then discuss the associated instrumentations. Gaia will forever change the way we approach this subject. However, Gaia on its own is not enough. Ground-based complementary spectroscopy is necessary to obtain full phase-space information and elemental abundances for stars fainter than the top few percent of the bright part of the Gaia catalogue. I will review the requirement on instrumentation for Gaia follow-up that Galactic Archeology sets. In particular, I will discuss the requirements on radial velocity and elemental abundance determination, including a brief look at potential pit-falls in the abundance analysis (e.g., NLTE, atomic diffusion). This contribution also provides a non-exhaustive comparison of the various current and future spectrographs for Galactic Archeology. Finally, I will discuss the needs for astrophysical calibrations for the surveys and inter-survey calibrations.