Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey
The Galaxy And Mass Assembly 'survey' is a project that plans to exploit the latest generation of ground-based wide-field survey facilities to study cosmology and galaxy formation and evolution. GAMA plans to bring together data from a number of world class instruments:
- The Anglo-Australian Telescope,
- The VLT Survey Telescope
- The Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy
- The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder
- The Herschel Space Observatory
- The Galaxy Evolution Explorer
based on a spectroscopic redshift survey on the AAT's AAOmega spectrograph.
The main objective of GAMA is to study structure on scales of 1 kpc to 1 Mpc. This includes galaxy clusters, groups, mergers and coarse measurements of galaxy structure. It is on these scales where baryons play a critical role in the galaxy formation and subsequent evolutionary processes and where our understanding of structure in the Universe breaks down.
GAMA's primary goal is to test the CDM paradigm of structure formation. In particular, the key scientific objectives are:
- A measurement of the dark matter halo mass function of groups and clusters using group velocity dispersion measurements.
- A comprehensive determination of the galaxy stellar mass function to Magellanic Cloud masses to constrain baryonic feedback processes.
- A direct measurement of the recent galaxy merger rates as a function of mass, mass ratio, local environment and galaxy type.