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Published January 2022 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

The PHANGS-HST Survey: Physics at High Angular Resolution in Nearby Galaxies with the Hubble Space Telescope

Abstract

The PHANGS program is building the first data set to enable the multiphase, multiscale study of star formation across the nearby spiral galaxy population. This effort is enabled by large survey programs with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), MUSE on the Very Large Telescope, and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), with which we have obtained CO(2–1) imaging, optical spectroscopic mapping, and high-resolution UV–optical imaging, respectively. Here, we present PHANGS-HST, which has obtained NUV–U–B–V–I imaging of the disks of 38 spiral galaxies at distances of 4–23 Mpc, and parallel V- and I-band imaging of their halos, to provide a census of tens of thousands of compact star clusters and multiscale stellar associations. The combination of HST, ALMA, and VLT/MUSE observations will yield an unprecedented joint catalog of the observed and physical properties of ∼100,000 star clusters, associations, H ii regions, and molecular clouds. With these basic units of star formation, PHANGS will systematically chart the evolutionary cycling between gas and stars across a diversity of galactic environments found in nearby galaxies. We discuss the design of the PHANGS-HST survey and provide an overview of the HST data processing pipeline and first results. We highlight new methods for selecting star cluster candidates, morphological classification of candidates with convolutional neural networks, and identification of stellar associations over a range of physical scales with a watershed algorithm. We describe the cross-observatory imaging, catalogs, and software products to be released. The PHANGS high-level science products will seed a broad range of investigations, in particular, the study of embedded stellar populations and dust with the James Webb Space Telescope, for which a PHANGS Cycle 1 Treasury program to obtain eight-band 2–21 μm imaging has been approved.

Additional Information

© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2021 January 7; revised 2021 July 26; accepted 2021 August 20; published 2022 January 10. Based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained from the data archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. Support for Program number 15654 was provided through a grant from the STScI under NASA contract NAS5-26555. J.C.L. acknowledges the W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) for its support of PHANGS-HST collaboration meetings where key work for this paper was performed. The PHANGS-HST survey benefited from discussions at the 2014 KISS workshop, "Bridging the Gap: Observations and Theory of Star Formation Meet on Large and Small Scales." J.M.D.K. and M.C. gratefully acknowledge funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through an Emmy Noether Research Group (grant No. KR4801/1-1) and the DFG Sachbeihilfe (grant No. KR4801/2-1) and from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program via the ERC Starting Grant MUSTANG (grant agreement No. 714907). F.B. and A.B. acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 726384/Empire). R.S.K. and S.C.O.G. acknowledge financial support from the DFG via the collaborative research center (SFB 881, Project-ID 138713538) "The Milky Way System" (subprojects A1, B1, B2, and B8). They also acknowledge subsidies from the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence STRUCTURES in the framework of Germany's Excellence Strategy (grant EXC-2181/1-390900948) and funding from the ERC via the ERC Synergy Grant ECOGAL (grant 855130). K.K., O.E., and F.S. gratefully acknowledge funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the form of an Emmy Noether Research Group (grant No. KR4598/2-1, PI Kreckel). E.W. acknowledges support from the DFG via SFB 881 'The Milky Way System' (project-ID 138713538; subproject P2). T.G.W. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 694343). E.R. acknowledges the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), funding reference number RGPIN-2017-03987. This paper makes use of the following ALMA data, which have been processed as part of the PHANGS-ALMA survey: ADS/JAO.ALMA#2012.1.00650.S ADS/JAO.ALMA#2013.1.01161.S ADS/JAO.ALMA#2015.1.00925.S ADS/JAO.ALMA#2015.1.00956.S ADS/JAO.ALMA#2017.1.00886.L. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. Software: PyRAF (Science Software Branch at STScI 2012), Astrodrizzle (STSCI Development Team 2012), DOLPHOT (v2.0; Dolphin 2016), Photutils (Bradley et al. 2019), CIGALE (Burgarella et al. 2005; Noll et al. 2009; Boquien et al. 2019).

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023