done in a quite different way, so the jury is
still out.
The Next Steps: Hubble and the
GOGREEN Survey
Our team is taking steps to better understand the quenching process in distant clusters. We have recently been awarded time
to take H-alpha images of the GCLASS clusters with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
With HST’s resolution in the near-infrared we
should be able to not only resolve the starforming disks in cluster galaxies, but also see
if they really have been stripped by the intracluster gas.
Even more exciting is the recent start of the
GOGREEN (Gemini Observations of Galaxies in Rich Early ENvironments) survey. This
440 hour program is one of the new Gemini
Large and Long programs and will obtain
spectra for ~1000 cluster and group galaxies
at 1.0 < z < 1.5 using the recently-upgraded
Hamamatsu chips on both GMOS South
and soon on GMOS North. GOGREEN will
go much deeper than GCLASS and allow us
to access higher-redshift clusters, as well as
much lower-mass galaxies. This should allow
us to better understand how galaxies of different masses are affected by their environments, as well as whether the whole process
changes over cosmic time. GOGREEN observations are slated for completion in 2017,
and we look forward to summarizing those
results in a future GeminiFocus article.
References
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time-scale 2