Dear Hector,
The observations on the morning of 15 February successfully completed the Abell 1367 field, concluding project a2048 which began on 21 December 2005. Thank you for the 2739.5 hours of observing you have scheduled for us on this project!
That's right : after more than 2700 hours of observations with Arecibo, spread over more then 13 years, the Arecibo Galaxy Environment Survey is now complete. The precursor observations started even further back, in 2004. I joined up as a fresh-faced PhD student in 2006 and it's been the core of my research ever since.
From the project website :
The Arecibo Galaxy Environment Survey (normally known as AGES) is using the Arecibo Telescope to search for galaxies in a number of quite different areas of the local universe. These vary form the Virgo Cluster, where there are huge numbers of galaxies very close together, to the Local Void, a region where the few galaxies to be found are very spread out. How many galaxies are in a region, and how close together they are, affects the way galaxies develop; but we are also finding other differences between the different areas that are left over from the time galaxies were first forming. By investigating these differences we are finding out more about how galaxies formed and how they are still developing today.AGES uses the awesome power of the massive 305m Arecibo dish to search for neutral hydrogen. Its unique feature is its sensitivity over a large area. Only a handful of other surveys can claim higher sensitivity levels, and they're all over much smaller areas of the sky. AGES has survived management changes, bizarre management, good management, bad management,flooding, hurricanes, students, and yet more managerial crises.
What have we got to show for all this ? Ten direct papers plus numerous spin-offs, including such highlights as :
- Keenan's Ring, a ring of hydrogen larger than the full Moon sitting right next door to M33 that no-one knew about before we came along. How did it get there ? We have no idea !
- The largest streams of neutral hydrogen known so far !
- Dark galaxy candidates !
- Doodles and poetry !
And lots more. There at at least 1,000 unpublished detections in need of analysis and publication. I can only give you some hints as to what awaits us... Re-analysing my very first data sets with new visualisation tools found long hydrogen streams we'd previously missed (paper submitted), so even the oldest archival data may yet hold more discoveries. We've also found several ultra-diffuse galaxies which are gas-rich, which we did follow-up molecular gas observations using the IRAM 30 m telescope in Spain. How many more of these weird objects could be lurking in the archives ? We only have 3 really unambiguous targets, but we estimate there could be as many as hundred just waiting for someone to accurately classify them. And we have a survey region of the Leo Ring which is guaranteed to be interesting, our successor survey WAVES is already delivering some very interesting results (first paper submitted), and other fields where we just don't know what we might find.
The data collection is complete. The science will continue, very much literally, for years to come.
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