GA-NIFS

The GA-NIFS survey is an ambitious project which aims to reveal the internal structure and close environment of distant galaxies using observations with the JWST/NIRSpec integral field spectrograph (IFS), having allocated over 300 hours of JWST prime time. The revolutionary capabilities of NIRSpec provide us with spatially resolved spectroscopy in the 1-5 μm range of a sample of over 50 galaxies in the redshift range between 3 and 11, or 11.5 to 13.5 billion years ago. These include galaxies hosting "Active Galactic Nuclei" (AGN), whose emission is caused by matter falling into their central supermassive black holes, as well as star-forming galaxies.
IFS observations of individual high-redshift galaxies with NIRSpec will enable us to investigate in detail the most important physical processes driving galaxy evolution across the cosmic epoch. The main goals of these observations are:
● to trace where new stars are born in galaxies
● to map the physical properties of the stellar populations
● to trace the kinematics of the gas (i.e. velocity fields, turbulence) and, therefore, determine what is driving these motions, including unseen matter and non-equilibrium motions
● to map the distribution of chemical elements and interstellar dust.
With this program we will extend observations of the Hα line up to z~7. The current ground-based studies of this line are limited to z ≃ 2.5 and are affected by the Earth's atmosphere, which causes low sensitivity and degraded angular resolution.