CLIFS: The Coma Legacy IFU Survey

The Coma Legacy IFU Survey is an extensive, new optical IFU survey of the Coma Cluster. CLIFS will deliver resolved optical spectroscopy at kiloparsec-scale resolution for more than 100 star-forming Coma galaxies.

The WEAVE spectrograph

A substantial portion of CLIFS data will be in the form of new observations from the WEAVE spectrograph on the William Herschel Telescope. Currently, CLIFS data is being taken with the Large IFU (LIFU) mode on WEAVE. The WEAVE LIFU is a fibre-fed IFU spectrograph with wide wavelength coverage and an extremely large field-of-view. Full technical details can be found here.

Survey design & progress

CLIFS is a combination of publically available MaNGA IFU spectroscopy as well as newly obtained WEAVE IFU spectroscopy for Coma galaxies. The ultimate goal of CLIFS is to obtain resolved optical spectroscopy for all star-forming and green-valley galaxies in Come with SDSS redshifts and log Mstar > 9.

To-date, we have been allocated observing time for all high-mass Coma galaxies (log Mstar > 10) as well as all Coma galaxies with ram pressure tails ("jellyfish galaxies") that do not already have existing MaNGA data. We also intend to target the low-mass Coma galaxies without MaNGA spectroscopy, however this will not be possible until the mini-IFU mode on WEAVE is commissioned.

Scientific topics

The scientific value of a large, unbiased IFU survey of the nearest massive galaxy cluster is immense. Below we list some of the core scientific topics of CLIFS, though this is far from an exhaustive list.

  • What physical processes drive star formation quenching in the Coma Cluster?
  • Do all ram pressure tails (traced by the low-frequency radio continuum) host ongoing star formation?
  • Is the relationship between star formation and molecular gas content altered by the environment of a massive galaxy cluster?
  • What is driving the excess radio continuum emission observed in star-forming cluster galaxies?

Get in touch

We intend for CLIFS to be an open collaboration. If you are interested in contributing data reduction/analysis expertise, or if you have a scientific project in mind that would benefit from access to CLIFS data, please reach out to Ian Roberts (ianr [at] uwaterloo.ca).