WEAVE: The next generation wide-field spectroscopy facility for the WHT - Build Phase
Description: WEAVE is a new facility instrument, designed for the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope on the island of La Palma, which will upgrade the telescope with new correcting optics to give a high quality 2 degree-diamter field of view (4x the diameter of the full moon). Within this field, a robotic positioning system will allow optical fibres to select up to 1000 simultaneous targets for observation by a new highly efficient spectrograph which is optimised to deliver accurate measurements of the velocities and chemical signatures of the target sources. This facility will enable a survey of close to 10 million stars within the disk and halo of our Galaxy. These observations will be combined with new data from ESA's imminent Gaia mission to provide a detailed map of both the structure and the assembly history of the Milky Way.
WEAVE will also be used to study the population of external galaxies, extending over most of the observable history of the Universe, that will be identified by the new European LOw-Frequency ARray radio telescope (LOFAR), providing detailed information on the evolutionary history of star-formation, and a trace of the elusive Dark Energy component that appears to dominate the present-day expansion of the Universe.
In the nearby Universe, WEAVE will be able to reveal the internal dynamics of 10,000 galaxies, providing for the first time a detailed comparison of the dynamics of the older stellar populations, the areas of current star-formation activity, and (from new radio-frequency observations) the underlying distribution of cold hydrogen gas.
The construction of WEAVE is a collaboration between UK institutions, the Isaac Newton Group of telescopes in La Palma (currently operated by STFC) and partners in the Netherlands, Spain and France. With a 4 year construction preiod, the instrument will be delivered to the telescope early in 2017.
Amount: £916,300
Funding type: research
Start date: 2014-03-31
End date: 2018-03-30
Subfield: Instrumentation
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Funded outputs count: 23
Funder award ID: ST/M002128/1
OpenAlex ID: G6181734526