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Paper: Galactic Archeology – Requirements on Survey Spectrographs
Volume: 507, Multi-Object Spectroscopy in the Next Decade: Big Questions, Large Surveys, and Wide Fields
Page: 85
Authors: Feltzing, S.
Abstract: Galactic Archeology is about exploring the Milky Way as a galaxy by, mainly, using its (old) stars as tracers of past events and thus to figure out the formation and evolution of our Galaxy. I will briefly outline some of the key scientific aspects of Galactic Archeology and then discuss the associated instrumentation. Gaia will forever change the way we approach this subject. However, Gaia on its own is not enough. Ground-based complementary spectroscopy is necessary to obtain full phase-space information and elemental abundances for stars fainter than the top few percent of the bright part of the Gaia catalog. I will review the requirement on instrumentation for Gaia follow-up that Galactic Archeology sets. In particular, I will discuss the requirements on radial velocity and elemental abundance determination, including a brief look at potential pitfalls in the abundance analysis (e.g., NLTE, atomic diffusion). This contribution also provides a non-exhaustive comparison of the various current and future spectrographs for Galactic Archeology. Finally, I will discuss the needs for astrophysical calibrations for the surveys and inter-survey calibrations.
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