About KROSS

The peak in the volume averaged star-formation rate in galaxies occurs in the redshift range z~1-2. At this epoch, the star formation rate in typical galaxies is an order of magnitude higher than in the local Universe. To determine the dynamical state of galaxies at this epoch, between 2014--2018 we invested ~30 nights of guarenteed time to undertake a spatially-resolved study of hundreds of z~1 galaxies using the KMOS near-infrared multi-integral-field-unit (IFU) spectrograph (the KMOS Redshift One Spectroscopic Survey; KROSS). KROSS is a joint project between Durham and Oxford Universities, with contributions from the UK Astronomy Technology Centre at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.

KMOS comprises 24 IFUs which are deployable across a 7.2-arcmin field of view. Each IFU has a 3×3 arcsecond field and the spectrograph can operate between 0.8 and 2.5um. KMOS was constructed by a UK-German consortium, and is installed on UT1 of ESO's Very Large Telescope.

The survey description, sample selection and initial results are presented in Stott et al 2016. A list of publications here. Public release data cubes, data products and catalogues can be found here.

Example galaxies from the KROSS sample, with the dynamics in the first panel set according to their velocity field (right panel).


The velocity maps of ~552 spatially resolved KROSS galaxies, distributed in the SFR versus mass plane (Harrison et al. 2017).