Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): A study of energy, mass, and structure (1kpc-1Mpc) at z < 0.3

TL;DR

The GAMA survey provides a comprehensive, multi-wavelength dataset of over 250,000 low-redshift galaxies, enabling detailed studies of their mass, energy, and structural evolution over 3 billion years, serving as a benchmark for galaxy formation models.

Contribution

This paper introduces the GAMA survey's extensive dataset and its unique features, including high completeness, simple selection criteria, and broad panchromatic coverage, for studying galaxy evolution.

Findings

High redshift completeness (~98%) enables robust galaxy group catalogues.

Multi-wavelength data allows detailed energy distribution analysis.

Benchmark resource for comparing galaxy formation simulations.

Abstract

The GAMA survey has now completed its spectroscopic campaign of over 250,000 galaxies ($r<19.8$mag), and will shortly complete the assimilation of the complementary panchromatic imaging data from GALEX, VST, VISTA, WISE, and Herschel. In the coming years the GAMA fields will be observed by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder allowing a complete study of the stellar, dust, and gas mass constituents of galaxies within the low-z Universe ($z<0.3$). The science directive is to study the distribution of mass, energy, and structure on kpc-Mpc scales over a 3billion year timeline. This is being pursued both as an empirical study in its own right, as well as providing a benchmark resource against which the outputs from numerical simulations can be compared. GAMA has three particularly compelling aspects which set it apart: completeness, selection, and panchromatic coverage. The very high redshift completeness ($\sim 98$\%) allows for extremely complete and robust pair and group catalogues; the simple selection ($r<19.8$mag) minimises the selection bias and simplifies its management; and the panchromatic coverage, 0.2$\mu$m - 1m, enables studies of the complete energy distributions for individual galaxies, well defined sub-samples, and population assembles (either directly or via stacking techniques). For further details and data releases see: http://www.gama-survey.org/