SSC Home Page

Legacy Program: SAGE-Spectroscopy

SPITZER HOME || SPITZER SCIENCE || INSTRUMENTS || SCIENCE USER SUPPORT || SEARCH
+ - General Information
- Spitzer News
- Research Categories
- Science Schedules
- Advisory Groups
- Observing Rules
- Legacy Program
- First-Look Survey
+ - Observatory & Instruments
- Overview
- PCS
- IRAC
- IRS
- MIPS
- AOTs
+ - Science User Support
- Proposal Kit
- Documents
- Tools
+ - Approved Programs
- Observing Schedules
+ - Data Archives / Analysis
- Science Archive Access
- Post-BCD Tools
+ - Data Analysis Funding
- Information
+ - FAQ
- Search site

"SAGE-Spectroscopy: The life cycle of dust and gas in the Large Magellanic Cloud"

Principal Investigator: Alexander Tielens (NASA Ames Research Center)

Total Observatory Time: 224.4 hours

Cycling of matter between the ISM and stars drives the evolution of a galaxy's visible matter and its emission characteristics. To understand this recycling, the SAGE legacy project has surveyed the Large Magellanic Cloud with IRAC and MIPS to study the physical processes of the ISM, the formation of new stars and the injection of mass by evolved stars and their relationships on the galaxy-wide scale. Due to its proximity, favorable viewing angle, and multi-wavelength information, the LMC is uniquely suited to survey the agents of a galaxy's evolution, the ISM and stars. We propose to leverage the SAGE legacy program to conduct a comprehensive IRS and MIPS-SED spectroscopy program of dust with the goal to determine the composition, origin, evolution, and observational characteristics of interstellar dust and its role in the LMC. Analysis of the spectra will yield composition and abundance of the dust compounds in different LMC objects, including AGB stars, post-AGB, young stellar objects, HII regions and the general diffuse ISM and provide a quantitative picture of the dust lifecyle. Besides dust features, the spectra will also contain molecular and atomic emission and absorption lines, providing the diagnostics to determine physical parameters such as temperature, density and radiation field - all important to the formation and processing of dust, and understanding the life cycle of matter. The proposed spectroscopic survey will provide critical underpinning for the SAGE survey by linking observed IRAC and MIPS colors of LMC objects to the infrared spectral type of the object. We will to the maximum extent utilize the LMC spectroscopy available in the Spitzer archive. A subset of the IRS point sources from this proposal will also be surveyed in MIPS SED. Legacy data products that will be made available to the public include all reduced single point spectra and data cubes, feature maps, a spectral catalog, and a fully classified SAGE point source catalog.

SPITZER HOME || SPITZER SCIENCE || INSTRUMENTS || SCIENCE USER SUPPORT || SEARCH

help@spitzer.caltech.edu
http://ssc.spitzer.caltech.edu/legacy/abs/tielens.html
This file was last modified on Thu Apr 24 16:46:59 2008.

California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA