PRIMUS: PRIsm MUlti-object Survey

 

The Project: PRIMUS is the largest faint galaxy spectroscopic redshift survey to date.  It is a spectroscopic survey to z=1 with ~120,000 robust galaxy redshifts covering >9 sq. deg. of the sky, focusing on regions with deep Spitzer, optical, GALEX and X-ray data.  Using a custom-built low-resolution prism on the IMACS instrument on the 6.5m Magellan/Baade telescope, we are able to obtain redshifts of faint galaxies ~10x faster than comparable spectroscopic redshift surveys with a precision of dz/(1+z)<0.005.  This technique is faster than photometric redshift surveys and provides more precise redshifts. 


The Team:  James Aird, Alison Coil (co-PI), Mike Blanton (co-PI), Scott Burles, Richard Cool, Daniel Eisenstein (co-PI), John Moustakas, Ken Wong, Guangtun Zhu


The Status: PRIMUS is done taking data.  We obtained spectra of 270,000 sources to i=23.5.  We have produced our first redshift catalog and are writing our first science papers. Funding for PRIMUS is provided by NSF (AST-0607701, AST-0908246, AST-0908442, AST-0908354) and NASA (Spitzer-1356708, NNX09AC95G, 08-ADP08-0019).


List of PRIMUS publications on team wiki:

http://howdy.physics.nyu.edu/index.php/PRIMUS_Publications