The VLA-ANGST Survey

VLA-ANGST: Very Large Array - ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury

(image by Adrienne Stilp)

Overview

VLA-ANGST ("Very Large Array - ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury") is an NRAO Large Program to observe 35 nearby (distance <4Mpc) galaxies in the 21cm line of neutral atomic hydrogen (HI). All VLA-ANGST galaxies were observed at high spatial (~6", corresponding to ~100pc) and high spectral (0.65-2.6 km/s) resolution in the VLA B, C, and D array configurations. The galaxies are selected to map all gas-rich and actively star forming objects that are included in the "ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury" (ANGST). ANGST is a systematic survey to establish a legacy of uniform multi-color photometry of resolved stars for a volume-limited sample of nearby galaxies (D < 4 Mpc). The ANGST observations allow derivation of spatially resolved star formation histories (SFHs). The high spatial resolution of the VLA-ANGST observations allow meaningful comparisons to these ANGST SFH maps, as well as to surveys at other wavelengths such as LVL, KINGFISH, and 11HUGS. In addition, THINGS, LITTLE THINGS, SHIELD, and VLA-ANGST all follow similar observation strategies and data reduction procedures for a combined sample of >100 galaxies.

The Team

Juergen Ott (NRAO)
Adrienne Stilp (University of Washington)
Steven Warren (University of Minnesota)
Evan Skillman (University of Minnesota)
Julianne Dalcanton (University of Washington)
Fabian Walter (Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie)
Erwin de Blok (ASTRON)
Baerbel Koribalski (CSIRO/CASS)
Andrew West (Boston University)

The HI Nearby Galaxy Survey (THINGS)

The Local Irregulars That Trace Luminosity Extremes - The HI Nearby Galaxy Survey (LITTLE THINGS)

The Survey of HI in Extremely Low-mass Dwarfs (SHIELD)

The Local Volume HI Survey (LVHIS)

Key Insights on Nearby Galaxies: a Far-Infrared Survey with Herschel (KINGFISH)

Faint Irregular Galaxies GMRT Survey (FIGGS)

Westerbork observations of neutral Hydrogen in Irregular and SPiral galaxies (WHISP)

Local Volume Legacy Survey (LVL)

The 11 Mpc Halpha UV Galaxy Survey (11HUGS)

The Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey (SINGS)

SINGG/SUNGG/SONGG

The Local Sphere of Influence (LSI) H-band Survey

Acknowledgements

We thank the National Radio Astronomy Observatory for their generous time allocation, observing, and data reduction support for this Large Project. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. Support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation collaborative research grant `Star Formation, Feedback, and the ISM: Time Resolved Constraints from a Large VLA Survey of Nearby Galaxies,' grant number AST-0807710. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DGE-0718124. SRW is grateful for support from a Penrose Fellowship, a University of Minnesota Degree Dissertation Fellowship, and a NRAO Research Fellowship number 807515. We would like to thank the LITTLE THINGS and THINGS teams for collaboration on the calibration and imaging pipeline. We have made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. This research has also made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System (ADS).

Contact

For questions, please contact Juergen Ott