Low resolution spectrograph for 4MOST

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Hamburg University is currently leading the development of a new astronomical survey aimed at revealing the properties of "Dark Matter": WAVES is a spectroscopic survey of galaxies, that will cover ~2 million objects and measure the masses of ~100,000 groups of galaxies. With these data we will be able to constrain the mass and the self-interaction cross-section of the still unknown Dark Matter particle, and observe the evolution of galaxies over a time-scale of 7 billion years. The WAVES observations will be carried out with a new instrument called 4MOST. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has contracted the 4MOST Consortium to build this instrument for its 4-m VISTA telescope in Chile. Hamburg University is a member of this Consortium, which is comprised of 15 European and Australian institutions, and WAVES is an important component of the comprehensive, 5-year 4MOST survey programme currently being planned jointly by ESO and the Consortium.However, to ensure that 4MOST will indeed be able to deliver the data required by WAVES, it will need to be equipped with two low-resolution spectrographs, instead of just one such spectrograph as currently planned. The present proposal aims at securing the funding for the second spectrograph.