Hector - a revolutionary spectrograph for understanding how galaxies evolve

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Hector - a revolutionary spectrograph for understanding how galaxies evolve: The project team recently demonstrated the extraordinary power of a new Sydney-Australian Astronomical Observatory Multi-object Integral-field spectrograph (SAMI) at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. This early prototype demonstrated it was possible to place 13 hexabundles accurately onto the images of 13 galaxies and to obtain spectroscopy at 61 contiguous positions across each galaxy. This provides a wealth of information about stars and gas in each galaxy. SAMI has generated enormous interest in new science across the Australian and international community. This project intends to develop a far more powerful facility, 'Hector', that will allow us to answer new scientific questions. For the first time, we will learn how the properties of galaxies evolve with their surrounds, and what this tells us about how galaxies form.