StarFEAST (Star Formation in Environments Across Space and Time): a new CFHT MegaCam Community Survey

The CFHT has recently opened a call for a 5/6-years Community Survey starting in 2027-2028, making available a total of 1000-1400 nights equally shared in dark and bright time. I will briefly describe StarFEAST, a project aimed at studying the relationship between the star formation process and its surrounding environment (infall, feedback, external perturbations) at different scales, from individual star-forming complexes within the Milky Way, in well resolved Local Group galaxies, in nearby large scale structures, and in the distant (Z ~ 4.5) Universe. The selected targets will be observed with the wide field camera MegaCam using a set of narrow-band filters centered on the Halpha [SII], and [Oll] lines. The data will be used to identify the dominant radiation sources responsible for the ionisation of the gas, to study the distribution of the ionising radiation, quantify the activity of star formation in different environments and at different scales. Galaxies in local large-scale structures (the Great Wall and Perseus-Pisces Supercluster) will be selected to sample density environments from rich clusters such as Coma and A1367, to groups of intermediate halo mass, down to filaments and walls. Their comparative analysis will be crucial to quantify the role of the environment on the star formation activity of galaxies. The deep narrow-band images will also be used to detect low surface brightness filaments of gas produced during the interactions of galaxies with their surrounding environment, enabling the identification of the dominant perturbing mechanism in different density regions. They will also be used to identify gas expelled from massive stars in local star-forming complexes, or from the nucleus of massive galaxies, and thus study the feedback process at different scales.

Dr. Alessandro Boselli, Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (France)

My research activity is the study of galaxy evolution in rich environments using statistical analysis of large samples of local galaxies with multifrequency data, from the UV to the radio centimetric spectral domain. I am PI, co-PI, or co-I of several major surveys of the Virgo cluster such as GUViCS, VESTIGE, HRS, HeViCS, NGVS, MAUVE, VERTICO,
VICTORIA, and PI of the StarFEAST survey presented in this talk.