SAURON Team Meeting

This workshop is a one-week meeting of the SAURON team of Bacon, Davies and de Zeeuw.

The group is carrying out a systematic survey of a representative sample of 72 nearby elliptical and lenticular galaxies and Sa bulges with the custom-built panoramic integral-field spectrograph SAURON, which is used at the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope on La Palma. SAURON provides maps of the stellar and gaseous kinematics and the linestrength distributions over the optical extent of the galaxies. Together with high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy of the nuclei, these maps are used to determine the intrinsic shapes, the internal dynamical structure, the mass of the central black hole, and the history of metal enrichment in these systems.

The SAURON project started in spring 1999, and this past spring the observations of the 72 survey objects were completed. All data have been reduced, a number of new analysis tools have been developed, and papers on individual galaxies are in progress.  The aim is to address the status of the dynamical and stellar population modeling, the properties of the ellipticals, lenticulars and bulges as a group, as well as to plan follow-up observations.