The potential of using KMOS for multi-object massive star spectroscopy
Abstract
KMOS, the ``K-Band Multi-Object Spectrometer'', was built by a British-German consortium as a second generation instrument for the ESO Paranal Observatory. It is available to the user community since its successful commissioning in 2013 (Sharples et al. 2013). As a multi-object integral field spectrometer for the near infrared, KMOS offers 24 deployable IFUs of 2.8x2.8 arcsec and 14x14 spatial pixels each, which can either be placed individually within a 7.2 arcmin field of view or combined in a Mosaic mode in order to map contiguous fields on sky. The instrument covers the whole range of NIR atmospheric windows (0.8. . .2.5μm) with 5 spectral bands and a resolution of R ~ 3000. . .4000.
Although the main science driver for KMOS was to enable the study of galaxy formation and evolution through multiplexed observations of high-redshift galaxies, KMOS also already exhibited its tremendous potential for the spectroscopy of massive stars: A quantitative study of 27 RSGs in NGC 300 (Gazak et al. 2015) proves its applicability for the spectroscopy of individual stars even beyond the Local Group. A Mosaic observation of the Galactic centre (Feldmeier-Krause et al. 2015) demonstrates how spectra of early-type stars can be extracted from a contiguous field. Other applications include (but need not be limited to) velocity determinations of globular cluster stars, observations of jets/outflows of high mass protostars, or contiguous mapping of star-forming regions. We therefore aim at presenting the excellent capabilities of KMOS to a wider community and indicate potential applications.- Publication:
-
The Lives and Death-Throes of Massive Stars
- Pub Date:
- November 2017
- DOI:
- 10.1017/S1743921317001326
- Bibcode:
- 2017IAUS..329..454W
- Keywords:
-
- instrumentation: spectrographs;
- infrared: stars;
- stars: early-type;
- techniques: spectroscopic