The Physics and Mass Assembly of distant galaxies with the E-ELT

TL;DR

This study assesses the potential of the European Extremely Large Telescope with an advanced spectrograph to map the physical and chemical properties of distant galaxies, using extensive simulations to evaluate observational capabilities and limitations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed simulation-based analysis of the E-ELT's ability to perform spatially resolved spectroscopy of high-redshift galaxies, highlighting the impact of various observational parameters.

Findings

AO performance significantly affects science outcomes.

Telescope thermal background limits high-redshift observations.

A ~90-night survey can meet science goals with multiplexing.

Abstract

One of the main science goal of the future European Extremely Large Telescope will be to understand the mass assembly process in galaxies as a function of cosmic time. To this aim, a multi-object, AO-assisted integral field spectrograph will be required to map the physical and chemical properties of very distant galaxies. In this paper, we examine the ability of such an instrument to obtain spatially resolved spectroscopy of a large sample of massive (0.1<Mstellar<5e11Mo) galaxies at 2<z<6, selected from future large area optical-near IR surveys. We produced a set of about one thousand numerical simulations of 3D observations using reasonable assumptions about the site, telescope, and instrument, and about the physics of distant galaxies. These data-cubes were analysed as real data to produce realistic kinematic measurements of very distant galaxies. We then studied how sensible the scientific goals are to the observational (i.e., site-, telescope-, and instrument-related) and physical (i.e., galaxy-related) parameters. We specifically investigated the impact of AO performance on the science goal. We did not identify any breaking points with respect to the parameters (e.g., the telescope diameter), with the exception of the telescope thermal background, which strongly limits the performance in the highest (z>5) redshift bin. We find that a survey of Ngal galaxies that fulfil the range of science goals can be achieved with a ~90 nights program on the E-ELT, provided a multiplex capability M Ngal/8.