1. KMOS in the Galactic Center
- Author
-
Feldmeier-Krause, Anja
- Subjects
Astrophysics::High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena ,Astrophysics::Earth and Planetary Astrophysics ,Astrophysics::Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics ,Astrophysics::Galaxy Astrophysics - Abstract
The Galactic centre is a unique target to study the central region of a galaxy. At a distance of only 8 kpc from Earth, we find the main components of galaxy nuclei: a supermassive black hole, billions of stars, and a large amount of interstellar gas and dust in the central molecular zone, with ongoing star formation. One of the challenges in observing the Galactic centre is its large extent on the sky, over about one degree in longitude. Another challenge is the high interstellar extinction, about 30 mag in the Visual. However, extinction decreases with wavelength, down to 2.7 mag in the near-infrared K-band. KMOS combines two key properties that are necessary to efficiently observe the Galactic centre: It is a near-infrared instrument with a large field-of-view. It was used in the Galactic centre both in mosaic mode, as well as in MOS mode. I will present some of the studies that used KMOS observations of the Galactic centre. The flexibility of KMOS allows observations with a broad scope of scientific goals: to study stellar populations of the nuclear star cluster, a survey of young stellar objects, HII regions, and stellar kinematics of the extended Galactic centre region.
- Published
- 2019
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