MaNGA Ancillary Targets
About 5% of all MaNGA targets will come from one or more of the ancillary target programs, designed to accomplish additional scientific goals to those of the main MaNGA samples. These pages describe the scientific motivation and detailed target selection criteria of each program, and indicate how to get data for ancillary program objects.
Some ancillary programs are self-contained science projects in themselves, some represent calibrations or refinements of the MaNGA spectroscopic programs. The first set of MaNGA Ancillary programs were selected in a competitive call for proposals among the SDSSIV collaboration in July 2014. A second call for proposals occurred in January 2017.
Why observe ancillary programs?
The number density of the MaNGA main sample targets is not uniform on the sky, and in regions of lower-than-average target density, not all of the IFUs on a plate can be assigned to core target categories.
Parallel ancillary target programs were solicited to provide additional targets that could be used to fill these unallocated IFUs on every plate. In addition we felt that the broader scientific goals of the MaNGA survey could be enhanced by making a further small number of IFUs available (~5%) to target rarer classes of galaxies that represent important phases in galaxy evolution, but are underrepresented in the three main samples.
In addition to the parallel observations, programs for dedicated plates, where all the targets on a given plate are ancillary targets, were also solicited. Such programs are designed to allow the targeting of complementary samples that require a differing observing strategy from the main survey.
As part of DR15 we are releasing the data from 16 out of the 19 existing ancillary programs. For the remaining three programs no data has yet been obtained but may be available in future data releases. The ancillary target programs have flag data stored in MANGA_TARGET3, also appearing as MNGTARG3 in some summary files.
MaNGA Ancillary Programs on Shared Plates
The table below gives summary statistics for each of the ancillary target programs in DR15. The Targets column gives the number of targets over the full SDSS DR7 footprint as listed in the targeting catalog MaNGA_targets_extNSA_tiled_ancillary.fits. This is many more than will be observed during the survey. For more information about each program, including detailed target selection information, click on the name of the program.
| Program | Description | MANGA_TARGET3 / MNGTARG3 | Targets | Observed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Luminous AGN | Sample of luminous AGN selected from Swift BAT, [OIII] emission or WISE colors with Lbol > 1e45 erg/s designed to study the influence of AGN on a broad range of galaxy properties. | 1,2,3,4 | 267 | 25 |
| The Structure of Void Galaxies | Sample of Void galaxies designed to look for evidence of different evolutionary pathways in this very low density environment. | 5 | 31 | 3 |
| Edge-On Starbursts | Observations of highly star-forming galaxies to study the morphology and ionization state of material driven from the galactic disks in large-scale outflows | 6 | 115 | 20 |
| Close Pairs and Mergers | Observations of galaxies in various stages of merging, spread over a range in galaxy properties. | 7,8,9,10 | 511 | 57 |
| Writing MaNGA | Observations of Galaxy Zoo galaxies that for letters in the word MaNGA (for outreach purposes). | 11 | 13 | 1 |
| Massive Nearby Galaxies | The observations of the central regions of these nearby massive galaxies will provide much higher spatial resolution than the main MaNGA targets providing a important systematic test as well as several additional science analysis such as studies of Kinematically decoupled cores and even central black hole mass estimates. | 12 | 310 | 23 |
| Milky Way Analogs | Observations of Milky Way like galaxies to provide insights into how the Milky Way fits in the extragalactic context. | 13, 23 | 550 | 4 |
| Dwarf galaxies with MaNGA | Observations of a sample of Dwarf galaxies with M* < 1e9 Msun sampling a range of environments. | 14 | 247 | 22 |
| Early-Type Galaxies with Radio Jets | Observations of massive early-type galaxies showing radio jets to look for evidence of star formation suppression spatially coincident with the Jet. | 15 | 52 | 7 |
| DiskMass | Observations of face on disk galaxies already observed as part of the DiskMass survey, with the goal of testing and calibrating dynamical measures. | 16 | 15 | 3 |
| Brightest Cluster Galaxies | Observations of BCGs in halo mass ranges not well represented in the main MaNGA samples | 17 | 377 | 24 |
| MaNGA Resolved Stellar Populations | Observations of very nearby galaxies with resolved color-magnitude diagrams from the ANGST survey. | 18 | 4 | 1 |
| Coma Cluster | Observations of galaxies and intra-cluster light in the Coma Cluster. | 19 | - | 68 |
| IC342 | Observations of regions of interest in IC342. | 20 | - | 50 |
| M31 | Observations of regions of interest in M31. | 21 | - | 18 |
| SNIa Hosts | Observations of galaxy hosts of type Ia supernovae. | 26 | 60 | 1 |
