Best wishes for 2022 !
The MOSAIC Consortium wishes a beautiful Christmas and a bewitching new year 2022 to all of You.
MOSAIC http://www.mosaic-elt.eu, entering phase B in 2022.
ESO green light to enter into phase B
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After Phase A and during the pre-Phase B, the MOSAIC design concept has been consolidated, following collaborative work between the Consortium and ESO. The ESO Council approved on Tuesday Dec. 7th the proposed MOSAIC Construction Agreement which will be signed between the CNRS and ESO in March 2022. Phase B will officially start with the MOSAIC kickoff in June next year. Still, since the project is ready to move forward, an internal kickoff in February will set the real start of the Preliminary Design and Technology Completion phase.Register to MOSAIC !
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Registering to the MOSAIC community will keep you updated to with everything related to MOSAIC. Being registered will allow us to take you into account in our science programs and news. You will receive invitations to workshops and symposia. It will take you less than 5 minutes !Resolved stellar populations
in and beyond the Local Group
 Observations of resolved stellar populations with MOSAIC will enable us to trace and explore the star-formation and chemical-enrichment histories of large samples of galaxies. With current facilities, detailed spectroscopic observations of individual stars are limited to the Milky Way and its nearest neighbours, but reaching beyond the Local Group is essential in order to advance our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve under very different environmental conditions. MOSAIC will allow us, for the first time, to move to a broader range of galaxies in the Local Volume, from the edge of the Local Group out to Mpc distances, and to reach the faintest populations within the Milky Way. | ||
Performance of MOSAIC in the blue
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Simulations
Detailed simulations have been performed to assess the performance of the blue part of the visible spectrograph. To this end, we used the WEBSIM-COMPASS simulator. Our study aimed to understand the behavior of noise, the effects of sky variability, and the scaling between signal-to-noise (S/N) and several other observational (exposure time) and instrumental (resolution R, throughput T%) characteristics. Briefly, an astrophysical target was modeled as a high-resolution data cube, which was subsequently convolved with the point-spread function (PSF) that represented the optical path through the atmosphere and the telescope, including the adaptive optics system. Realistic sky background, photon noise, and detector noise were added. The simulator produced a data cube which we analyzed as if it were real data.
DIMACAV 2020 funding awarded to MOSAIC
We are proud to announce that 250000€ were awarded to MOSAIC by Île-de-France DIMACAV for the prototyping of an integral field unit. The Area of Major Interest ACAV + (Domaine d'Intérêt Majeur ACAV+ - DIMACAV) is labeled by the Île-de-France Region for the period 2017-2020 in order to support Paris region research in the fields of Astrophysics and Conditions of Appearance of Life. Link to the DIMACAV 2020 results
Inventory of Matter
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Mosaic will combine both visible and near-IR observations to conduct the first direct inventory of matter in distant galaxies at z~3, including characterising the dark matter profiles in disk galaxies, the distribution of neutral gas in the IGM, and probing all gas phases in the CGM. | ||
The ELT will be the largest telescope ever built...
The European organisation ESO has embarked on the construction of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in the middle of the Chilean desert. The telescope and its structure reach a volume comparable to eight times that of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
A monster of technology
The collecting power of its ultra-giant mirror, 39 metres in diameter, is equivalent to bringing together the 16 largest telescopes in the world. When it is built, probably shortly after 2026, the ELT will be able to observe the weakest sources in the sky. It will be able to study objects so far away that they are inaccessible to other telescopes, unlocking many mysteries in cosmology, about the formation of galaxies, for example the nature of small galaxies or star clusters far beyond our Galaxy or Local Group.
Moreover, since the resolving power of a telescope depends on its size, the ELT will be able to solve the stars with the smallest apparent sizes: the apparent size of the most distant galaxies is much smaller than an arcsecond (for comparison, the Moon’s apparent size is 1800 arcseconds). At these scales, observations are very much affected by the Earth’s atmospheric turbulence, requiring advanced techniques to overcome it, such as adaptive optics.
From the outset of the project, ESO has made a huge commitment to focus all its efforts on ensuring the highest possible spatial resolution. This is equivalent to counting the petals of a daisy 100 kilometres away! The goal is to distinguish an extrasolar planet from its star to distances approximately the thickness of a spiral arm of our Galaxy, in order to study in detail the planetary content of a considerable number of nearby and less nearby stars.
It’s a gamble that’s not insignificant since the main mirror will be made up of 798 segments, each 1.40 metres long, which will have to be aligned with an unequalled precision of only 15 millionths of a millimetre! The other four mirrors of the telescope will have to guarantee the same precision. In particular, two of these mirrors can be mechanically deformed to compensate for tiny variations in the path of light due to atmospheric turbulence. This is made possible by adaptive optics based on complex turbulence analysis systems.
Faced with the challenge of building a mastodon telescope capable of resolving the smallest sources of light in the universe, the European organisation ESO took an even riskier gamble: first install the most sophisticated instruments capable of obtaining the finest spatial resolutions, and only then the two instruments that use the telescope’s maximum collecting power instead (this being guaranteed, whatever the performance of the telescope and its enormous structure).
Read more: The ELT will be the largest telescope ever built...
Mapping the intergalactic medium
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The warm and hot gas between galaxies and within their halo is a reservoir of matter from which proto-galaxies can form. MOSAIC will provide an unprecedented map of the distant 3D structures of this gas as well as evaluating for the first time the distribution of the different baryonic components of the matter. | ||
Detailed simulations show that MOSAIC will play an important role in the mapping of the intergalactic medium. An ambitious galaxy survey with MOSAIC will provide a 3D map of the IGM at z > 3, complementing similar surveys that will focus on lower redshifts. In synergy with the missions like Euclid and JWST, MOSAIC will enable us to probe the full redshift evolution of galaxy growth in the cosmic web throughout the cosmic period of intense star formation.
Astro2020 Science White Paper : Local Dwarf Galaxy Archaeology
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Extremely Big Eyes on the Early Universe
9-13 septembre 2019, Romelink to the website of the conferenceScientific Rationale | ||