The final product of galaxy evolution through cosmic time is the population of galaxies in the local universe. These galaxies are also those that can be studied in most detail, thus providing a stringent benchmark for our understanding of galaxy evolution. Through the huge success of spectroscopic single-fiber, statistical surveys of the Local Universe in the last decade, it has become clear, however, that an authoritative observational description of galaxies will involve measuring their spatially resolved properties over their full optical extent for a statistically significant sample. We present here the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) survey, which has been designed to provide a first step in this direction. We summarize the survey goals and design, including sample selection and observational strategy. We also showcase the data taken during the first observing runs (June/July 2010) and outline the reduction pipeline, quality control schemes and general characteristics of the reduced data. This survey is obtaining spatially resolved spectroscopic information of a diameter selected sample of ∼600 galaxies in the Local Universe (0.005 < z < 0.03). CALIFA has been designed to allow the building of two-dimensional maps of the following quantities: (a) stellar populations: ages and metallicities; (b) ionized gas: distribution, excitation mechanism and chemical abundances; and (c) kinematic properties: both from stellar and ionized gas components. CALIFA uses the PPAK integral field unit (IFU), with a hexagonal field-of-view of ∼1.3 , with a 100% covering factor by adopting a three-pointing dithering scheme. The optical wavelength range is covered from 3700 to 7000 Å, using two overlapping setups (V500 and V1200), with different resolutions: R ∼ 850 and R ∼ 1650, respectively. CALIFA is a legacy survey, intended for the community. The reduced data will be released, once the quality has been guaranteed. The analyzed data fulfill the expectations of the original observing proposal, on the basis of a set of quality checks and exploratory analysis: (i) the final datacubes reach a 3σ limiting surface brightness depth of ∼23.0 mag/arcsec 2 for the V500 grating data (∼22.8 mag/arcsec 2 for V1200); (ii) about ∼70% of the covered field-of-view is above this 3σ limit; (iii) the data have a blue-to-red relative flux calibration within a few percent in most of the wavelength range; (iv) the absolute flux calibration is accurate within ∼8% with respect to SDSS; (v) the measured spectral resolution is ∼85 km s −1 for V1200 (∼150 km s −1 for V500); (vi) the estimated accuracy of the wavelength calibration is ∼5 km s −1 for the V1200 data (∼10 km s −1 for the V500 data); (vii) the aperture matched CALIFA and SDSS spectra are qualitatively and quantitatively similar. Finally, we show that we are able to carry out all measurements indicated above, recovering the properties of the stellar populations, the ionized gas and the kinematics of both components. The associated maps illustrate the spatial variation of...

Direct Lyα imaging of intergalactic gas atz 2 has recently revealed giant cosmological structures around quasars, e.g., the Slug Nebula. Despite their high luminosity, the detection rate of such systems in narrow-band and spectroscopic surveys is less than 10%, possibly encoding crucial information on the distribution of gas around quasars and the quasar emission properties. In this study, we use the MUSE integral-field instrument to perform a blind survey for giant a Ly nebulae around 17 bright radio-quiet quasars at < < z 3 4 that does not suffer from most of the limitations of previous surveys. After data reduction and analysis performed with specifically developed tools, we found that each quasar is surrounded by giant a Ly nebulae with projected sizes larger than 100 physical kiloparsecs and, in some cases, extending up to 320 kpc. The circularly averaged surface brightness profiles of the nebulae appear to be very similar to each other despite their different morphologies and are consistent with power laws with slopes»-1.8. The similarity between the properties of all these nebulae and the Slug Nebula suggests a similar origin for all systems and that a large fraction of gas around bright quasars could be in a relatively "cold" (T ∼ 10 4 K) and dense phase. In addition, our results imply that such gas is ubiquitous within at least 50 kpc from bright quasars at < < z 3 4 independently of the quasar emission opening angle, or extending up to 200 kpc for quasar isotropic emission.

We report the detection of extended Lyα haloes around 145 individual star-forming galaxies at redshifts 3 ≤ z ≤ 6 in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field observed with the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) at ESO-VLT. Our sample consists of continuum-faint (−15 ≥ M UV ≥ −22) Lyα emitters (LAEs). Using a 2D, two-component (continuum-like and halo) decomposition of Lyα emission assuming circular exponential distributions, we measure scale lengths and luminosities of Lyα haloes. We find that 80% of our objects having reliable Lyα halo measurements show Lyα emission that is significantly more extended than the UV continuum detected by HST (by a factor ≈4 to >20). The median exponential scale length of the Lyα haloes in our sample is ≈4.5 kpc with a few haloes exceeding 10 kpc. By comparing the maximal detected extent of the Lyα emission with the predicted dark matter halo virial radii of simulated galaxies, we show that the detected Lyα emission of our selected sample of Lyα emitters probes a significant portion of the cold circum-galactic medium of these galaxies (>50% in average). This result therefore shows that there must be significant HI reservoirs in the circum-galactic medium and reinforces the idea that Lyα haloes are ubiquitous around high-redshift Lyα emitting galaxies. Our characterization of the Lyα haloes indicates that the majority of the Lyα flux comes from the halo (≈65%) and that their scale lengths seem to be linked to the UV properties of the galaxies (sizes and magnitudes). We do not observe a significant Lyα halo size evolution with redshift, although our sample for z > 5 is very small. We also explore the diversity of the Lyα line profiles in our sample and we find that the Lyα lines cover a large range of full width at half maximum (FWHM) from 118 to 512 km s −1 . While the FWHM does not seem to be correlated to the Lyα scale length, most compact Lyα haloes and those that are not detected with high significance tend to have narrower Lyα profiles (<350 km s −1 ). Finally, we investigate the origin of the extended Lyα emission but we conclude that our data do not allow us to disentangle the possible processes, i.e. scattering from star-forming regions, fluorescence, cooling radiation from cold gas accretion, and emission from satellite galaxies.

We present the MUSE Hubble Ultra Deep Survey, a mosaic of nine MUSE fields covering 90% of the entire HUDF region with a 10-h deep exposure time, plus a deeper 31-h exposure in a single 1.15 arcmin 2 field. The improved observing strategy and advanced data reduction results in datacubes with sub-arcsecond spatial resolution (0 . 65 at 7000 Å) and accurate astrometry (0 . 07 rms). We compare the broadband photometric properties of the datacubes to HST photometry, finding a good agreement in zeropoint up to m AB = 28 but with an increasing scatter for faint objects. We have investigated the noise properties and developed an empirical way to account for the impact of the correlation introduced by the 3D drizzle interpolation. The achieved 3σ emission line detection limit for a point source is 1.5 and 3.1 × 10 −19 erg s −1 cm −2 for the single ultra-deep datacube and the mosaic, respectively. We extracted 6288 sources using an optimal extraction scheme that takes the published HST source locations as prior. In parallel, we performed a blind search of emission line galaxies using an original method based on advanced test statistics and filter matching. The blind search results in 1251 emission line galaxy candidates in the mosaic and 306 in the ultradeep datacube, including 72 sources without HST counterparts (m AB > 31). In addition 88 sources missed in the HST catalog but with clear HST counterparts were identified. This data set is the deepest spectroscopic survey ever performed. In just over 100 h of integration time, it provides nearly an order of magnitude more spectroscopic redshifts compared to the data that has been accumulated on the UDF over the past decade. The depth and high quality of these datacubes enables new and detailed studies of the physical properties of the galaxy population and their environments over a large redshift range.