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V. Wild et al. ; We present optical integral field spectroscopy (IFS) observations of the Mice, a major merger between two massive (≥ 1011 M ·) gas-rich spirals NGC 4676A and B, observed between first passage and final coalescence. The spectra provide stellar and gas kinematics, ionised gas properties, and stellar population diagnostics, over the full optical extent of both galaxies with ∼1.6 kpc spatial resolution. The Mice galaxies provide a perfect case study that highlights the importance of IFS data for improving our understanding of local galaxies. The impact of first passage on the kinematics of the stars and gas has been significant, with strong bars most likely induced in both galaxies. The barred spiral NGC 4676B exhibits a strong twist in both its stellar and ionised gas disk. The edge-on disk galaxy NGC 4676A appears to be bulge free, with a strong bar causing its >boxy> light profile. On the other hand, the impact of the merger on the stellar populations has been minimal thus far. By combining the IFS data with archival multiwavelength observations we show that star formation induced by the recent close passage has not contributed significantly to the total star formation rate or stellar mass of the galaxies. Both galaxies show bicones of high ionisation gas extending along their minor axes. In NGC 4676A the high gas velocity dispersion and Seyfert-like line ratios at large scaleheight indicate a powerful outflow. Fast shocks (vs ∼ 350 km s-1) extend to ∼6.6 kpc above the disk plane. The measured ram pressure (P/k = 4.8 × 106 K cm-3) and mass outflow rate (∼8-20 M· yr-1) are similar to superwinds from local ultra-luminous infrared galaxies, although NGC 4676A only has a moderate infrared luminosity of 3 × 1010 L·. Energy beyond what is provided by the mechanical energy of the starburst appears to be required to drive the outflow. Finally, we compare the observations to mock kinematic and stellar population maps extracted from a hydrodynamical merger simulation. The models show little enhancement in star formation during and following first passage, in agreement with the observations. We highlight areas where IFS data could help further constrain the models. © ESO, 2014. ; Funding and financial support acknowledgements: V.W. from the European Research Council Starting Grant (P.I. Wild SEDmorph), European Research Council Advanced Grant (P.I. J. Dunlop) and Marie Curie Career Reintegration Grant (P.I.Wild Phiz-ev); J.M. A. from the European Research Council Starting Grant (P.I.Wild SEDmorph); F. F. R. O. from the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT); A. G. from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n. 267251. The Dark Cosmology Centre is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. P. H. J. from the Research Funds of the University of Helsinki; J. F. B. from the Ramón y Cajal Programme, grants AYA2010-21322-C03-02 and AIB-2010-DE- 00227 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), as well as from the FP7 Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission, via the Initial Training Network DAGAL under REA grant agreement no. 289313; R. G. D. and R. G. B. from the Spanish project AYA2010-15081; A. M.-I. from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche through the STILISM project (ANR-12- BS05-0016-02) and from BMBF through the Erasmus-F project (grant number 05 A12BA1). R. A. M. from the Spanish programme of International Campus of Excellence Moncloa (CEI); K. J. from the Emmy Noether-Programme of the German Science Foundation (DFG) under grant Ja 1114/3-2; P. P., & J. M. G. from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under project FCOMP- 01-0124-FEDER-029170 (Reference FCT PTDC/FIS-AST/3214/2012), funded by FCT-MEC (PIDDAC) and FEDER (COMPETE). I. M. P. from Spanish grant AYA2010-15169 and the Junta de Andalucia through TIC-114 and the Excellence Project P08-TIC-03531; C. J. W. from the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant 303912; J. I. P. and J. V. M. from the Spanish MINECO under grant AYA2010-21887-C04-01, and from Junta de Andalucía Excellence Project PEX2011-FQM7058; E. M. Q. from the European Research Council via the award of a Consolidator Grant (PI McLure); M. P. from the Marie Curie Career Reintegration Grant (P.I. Wild Phiz-ev).This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHYS-1066293 and the hospitality of the Aspen Center for Physics. ; Peer Reviewed

20 pages, 18 figures.-- et al. ; Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs) provide a "standard ruler" of known physical length, making it one of the most promising probes of the nature of dark energy (DE). The detection of BAOs as an excess of power in the galaxy distribution at a certain scale requires measuring galaxy positions and redshifts. "Transversal" (or "angular") BAOs measure the angular size of this scale projected in the sky and provide information about the angular distance. "Line-of-sight" (or "radial") BAOs require very precise redshifts, but provide a direct measurement of the Hubble parameter at different redshifts, a more sensitive probe of DE. The main goal of this paper is to show that it is possible to obtain photometric redshifts with enough precision (σz) to measure BAOs along the line of sight. There is a fundamental limitation as to how much one can improve the BAO measurement by reducing σz . We show that σz ~ 0.003(1 + z) is sufficient: a much better precision will produce an oversampling of the BAO peak without a significant improvement on its detection, while a much worse precision will result in the effective loss of the radial information. This precision in redshift can be achieved for bright, red galaxies, featuring a prominent 4000 Å break, by using a filter system comprising about 40 filters, each with a width close to 100 Å, covering the wavelength range from ~4000 to ~8000 Å, supplemented by two broad-band filters similar to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey u and z bands. We describe the practical implementation of this idea, a new galaxy survey project, Physics of the Accelerating Universe (PAU): http://www.ice.cat/pau, to be carried out with a telescope/camera combination with an etendue about 20 m2 deg2, equivalent to a 2 m telescope equipped with a 6 deg2 field of view camera, and covering 8000 deg2 in the sky in four years. We expect to measure positions and redshifts for over 14 million red, early-type galaxies with L > L* and i(AB) ~ 10–3 Mpc–3 h3 galaxies within the 9 Gpc3 h–3 volume to be sampled by our survey, ensuring that the error in the determination of the BAO scale is not limited by shot noise. By itself, such a survey will deliver precisions of order 5% in the dark-energy equation of state parameter w, if assumed constant, and can determine its time derivative when combined with future cosmic microwave background measurements. In addition, PAU will yield high-quality redshift and low-resolution spectroscopy for hundreds of millions of other galaxies, including a very significant high-redshift population. The data set produced by this survey will have a unique legacy value, allowing a wide range of astrophysical studies. ; This work was carried out in the framework of the PAU Consolider Collaboration, supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC) through the Consolider Ingenio-2010 program, under project CSD2007-00060 "Physics of the Accelerating Universe (PAU)". Additional support comes from the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, as well as from the European Commission, the Spanish High Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), and the regional governments of Andalusia, Aragon, Catalonia, Madrid, and Valencia. ; Peer reviewed

Astronomy and Astrophysics 559 (2013): A114 reproduced with permission from Astronomy and Astrophysics ; The use of integral field spectroscopy is since recently allowing to measure the emission line fluxes of an increasingly large number of star-forming galaxies, both locally and at high redshift. Many studies have used these fluxes to derive the gas-phase metallicity of the galaxies by applying the so-called strong-line methods. However, the metallicity indicators that these datasets use were empirically calibrated using few direct abundance data points (Te-based measurements). Furthermore, a precise determination of the prediction intervals of these indicators is commonly lacking in these calibrations. Such limitations might lead to systematic errors in determining the gas-phase metallicity, especially at high redshift, which might have a strong impact on our understanding of the chemical evolution of the Universe. The main goal of this study is to review the most widely used empirical oxygen calibrations, O3N2 and N2, by using newdirect abundance measurements. We pay special attention to (1) the expected uncertainty of these calibrations as a function of the index value or abundance derived and (2) the presence of possible systematic offsets. This is possible thanks to the analysis of the most ambitious compilation of Te-based H ii regions to date. This new dataset compiles the Te-based abundances of 603 H ii regions extracted from the literature but also includes new measurements from the CALIFA survey. Besides providing new and improved empirical calibrations for the gas abundance, we also present a comparison between our revisited calibrations with a total of 3423 additional CALIFA H ii complexes with abundances derived using the ONS calibration from the literature. The combined analysis of T e-based and ONS abundances allows us to derive their most accurate calibration to date for both the O3N2 and N2 single-ratio indicators, in terms of all statistical significance, quality, and coverage of the parameters space. In particular, we infer that these indicators show shallower abundance dependencies and statistically significant offsets compared to others'. The O3N2 and N2 indicators can be empirically applied to derive oxygen abundances calibrations from either direct abundance determinations with random errors of 0.18 and 0.16, respectively, or from indirect ones (but based on a large amount of data), reaching an average precision of 0.08 and 0.09 dex (random) and 0.02 and 0.08 dex (systematic; compared to the direct estimations), respectively ; R.A. Marino is funded by the Spanish program of International Campus of Excellence Moncloa (CEI). D. Mast thank the Plan Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo funding programs, AYA2012-31935 of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, for the support given to this project. S.F.S thanks the the Ramón y Cajal project RyC-2011-07590 of the spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, for the support giving to this project. F.F.R.O. acknowledges the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) for financial support under the program Estancias Postdoctorales y Sabáticas al Extranjero para la Consolidación de Grupos de Investigación, 2010-2012. We acknowledge financial support for the ESTALLIDOS collaboration by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under grant AYA2010- 21887-C04-03. BG-L also acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) under grant AYA2012- 39408-C02-02. J.F.-B. acknowledges financial support from the Ramón y Cajal Program and grant AYA2010-21322-C03-02 from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), as well as to the DAGAL network from the People's Program (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union's Seventh Framework Program FP7/2007-2013/ under REA grant agreement number PITN-GA-2011-289313. CK has been funded by project AYA2010-21887 from the Spanish PNAYA. P.P. acknowledges support by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-029170 (Reference FCT PTDC/FIS-AST/3214/2012), funded by FCT-MEC (PIDDAC) and FEDER (COMPETE). R.M.G.D. and R.G.B. also acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) under grant AyA2010-15081. V.S., L.G., and A.M.M. acknowledge financial support from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) under program Ciência 2008 and the research grant PTDC/CTE-AST/112582/2009