The VST Early-type GAlaxy Survey: Exploring the Outskirts and Intra-cluster Regions of Galaxies in the Low-surface-brightness Regime

TL;DR

The VEGAS survey uses deep, multi-band imaging with the VST to study low-surface-brightness features of early-type galaxies across various environments, revealing faint structures and galaxy outskirts.

Contribution

This paper presents the VEGAS survey's methodology and initial science results, focusing on low-surface-brightness features in early-type galaxies in diverse environments.

Findings

Detection of faint structures down to mu_g~27-30 mag/arcsec^2

Insights into galaxy outskirts and intra-cluster regions

Enhanced understanding of low-surface-brightness phenomena

Abstract

The VST Early-type GAlaxy Survey (VEGAS) is a deep, multi-band (u, g, r, i) imaging survey, carried out with the 2.6-metre VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. VEGAS combines the wide (1-square-degree) OmegaCAM imager and long integration times, together with a specially designed observing strategy. It has proven to be a gold mine for studies of features at very low surface brightness, down to levels of mu_g~27-30 magnitudes arcsec^(-2), over 5-8 magnitudes fainter than the dark sky at Paranal. In this article we highlight the main science results obtained with VEGAS observations of galaxies across different environments, from dense clusters of galaxies to unexplored poor groups and in the field.