Today's Colloquium: WEAVE: The next-generation spectroscopic survey facility for the Northern Sky

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Clik here to view.© Nik Szymanek and Ian King

WEAVE is the next-generation wide-field survey facility for the William Herschel Telescope (WHT). WEAVE will provide the instrument required for full scientific exploitation of the Gaia, LOFAR, and APERTIF surveys in the Northern Hemisphere. WEAVE is a multi-object and multi-integral-field-unit (IFU) facility utilizing a large, new 2-degree-diameter prime focus corrector at the WHT with a pick-and-place fibre positioner system hosting nearly 1000 multi-object fibres or 20 mini-IFUs for each observation, or a single wide-field IFU. The fibres are fed into a dual-beam spectrograph located in the GHRIL enclosure on the WHT's Nasmyth platform. The spectrograph - built by NOVA in Dwingeloo - records nearly 1000 spectra simultaneously at a resolution of R~5000 over an instantenous wavelength range of 366-959 nm or at a resolution of R~20000 over two more-limited wavelength ranges. WEAVE will be on sky by early 2019 to provide complete phase-space coordinates of more than 5 million stars in the northern sky selected with ESO's Gaia satellite, distances and properties of galaxies selected from the low-frequency radio-wave surveys being conducted with LOFAR, "three-dimensional" spectroscopy of galaxies selected from surveys using the new Apertif focal plane array at WSRT, and deep surveys of galaxy clusters and moderate-redshift galaxies.